Recycled Plastic Pets for The New York Times for Kids
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photo by Claire Benoist
We Americans produce an average of 4.4 pounds of trash every day. Yikes! Of course we should recycle, and reduce our plastic consumption. You can also transform plastics in your home and recycle bin into all kinds of things….like animals! I was thrilled that in today’s New York Times Weekend Arts section today, they reran the spread of recycled plastic animals that I made a couple of years ago for their excellent monthly (print-only) Kids section in a mini kid’s section dedicated to recycling and the plastic problem.
photo by Claire Benoist
This flamingo is made from a pink plastic baby lotion bottle + drinking straw! The head is an old magic marker cap. The straw legs have pipe cleaners inside and they are inserted into holes in the base (a plastic jar lid) to stand the whole thing up. I glued on hole-punched black paper eyes.
photo by Claire Benoist
This lion is made from a long yellow squeeze-y mustard bottle with a snipped coffee can lid mane. The snout is an extra yellow plastic cap.
photo by Claire Benoist
Powder and shampoo bottles are the bases for this mini school of fish!
photo by Claire Benoist
A baby lotion piggy with map tack eyes is standing atop flexi straw legs..
photo by Claire Benoist
Spray tops + bottles + straws+ scrap plastic+ map tack eyes = a flock of birds!
photo by Claire Benoist
A mustard bottle giraffe with drinking straw legs and neck (and ears) and a bottlecap head.
Here is the whole spread! I wish it was online so I could share a better copy. But you really don’t need instructions. Let the shapes and colors of the plastics you collect inspire you! If you can see the white swan in the bottom row, it is a toilet cleaner…and I did almost nothing to it except cut the back open and add eyes!
Just a very small portion of the roomful of plastic containers, jugs, bottle caps, etc that I collected from kind friends, relatives, neighbor's recycle bins, and picking from laundromat dumpsters...glamorous work! It was great to have a big selection of shapes, sizes, and colors to get inspired!
Hot water helps to remove glued-on labels. Getting labels off some containers were harder and I wound up just leaving them on a few. You could always paint over those that are hard to remove with acrylic craft paint.
A full view of the chicken from above, dropping some (bottlecap) eggs! And a little detergent bottle bulldog.
Detergent bottles were also the basesfor this purple walrus and yellow elephant. I keep a stash of bottle caps so I have lots of colors to choose from for crafts!
I hope you’ll try making some plastic pets. Once you start, you won’t be able to pass a recycling bin without seeing a menagerie of possibilities!