HANCEVILLE — Hanceville students gathered Tuesday afternoon to celebrate the completion of a months-long project to collect more than 300 pounds of plastic lids that will be recycled and used to make benches. 

Students in the elementary and high schools worked together for the last few months to gather the plastic caps for Green Tree Plastic’s ABC Promise Partnership, which invites schools and organizations to collect caps and send them in to be recycled, said Hanceville High School Family and Consumer Science teacher and FCCLA sponsor Amy Chambers.

She said she got the idea to bring the project to Hanceville when she saw it in action at Saraland High School, and when she was planning the effort for Hanceville, she thought the schools would maybe collect the 100 pounds that is needed to make one bench.

In February, after a couple months of accepting the lids, she weighed the ones that had been gathered and saw that the schools had already collected 113 pounds — and the number continued to climb as the deadline for collections approached last week.

“My deadline was last Tuesday, and we had 100 pounds come in that day,” she said. 

In all, students collected right around 300 pounds of lids, and those will be recycled by the company to make three four-foot benches, Chambers said. 

She said the majority of the donations came from the elementary students, while the high school students who took part were primarily responsible for sorting the lids and making sure the bags did not contain any metal, paper or anything else that is not accepted by the recycling company.

Along with the bench that will be made with their donations, the younger kids also received another reward for their work, as each elementary student who brought in a gallon bag of plastic lids received a Hanceville t-shirt that was made in Chambers’ classroom.

Chambers said she was happy to see Hanceville be able to put together a project that the younger and older students were all able to be a part of — particularly a community service project like this one. 

“To have that many students involved in our project was really exciting for me,” she said. 

Next week is spring break for county schools, so the caps will be loaded up in a U-Haul and driven to Green Tree Plastic’s facility in Evansville, Indiana, where three benches will already be ready and waiting to be brought back to Hanceville in time for students to come back from their break, she said.

Chambers said one of the benches will go in her office, another will go in the elementary school and the other will be placed either in the high school or in the cafeteria.