Capricornia joins push to recycle bottle tops into prosthetics

Staff and prisoners at Capricornia Correctional Centre (CCC) have risen to the challenge of collecting bottle tops to be recycled into prosthetic arms and hands, amassing almost 14,500 caps in eight weeks.

Deputy General Manager Alexis Livingstone said everyone at CCC had responded enthusiastically to the national call-out to collect caps for the ambitious project to help children in developing countries.

“It is intrinsic to the work of Custodial Corrections Officers to help people, so bringing the centre together to help children in need is an obvious fit,” Superintendent Livingstone said.

“For our prisoners, it was an opportunity to give something back to the community while being incarcerated at Capricornia.”

The centre’s response was initiated by Administration Officer Dianne White in conjunction with Queensland Health staff at Capricornia, in response to a personal connection with someone in need.

Bottle tops collected by the centre were handed to North Rockhampton Rotary Club, which is collecting bottle tops in the region on behalf of Envision.

The centre will continue to collect bottle tops for the worthy cause.

Victoria-based Envision makes the bespoke prosthetics as part of e-Nable, a global online community of volunteers, which provides open-source designs for the 3D-printed prosthetics.

More than 8000 prosthetics have been distributed by e-Nable.

Envision originally planned to manufacture 100 prosthetics, with each hand requiring 500 caps and each arm requiring 1000 caps.

However, Envision director Sean Teer said public response to the project had been overwhelming, with more than 5 million caps collected to date.

“Capricornia Correctional Centre has done a remarkable job and so has the rest of Australia in getting behind this project,” Mr Teer said. “We are extraordinarily thankful.”

Envision is now working to recycle the caps in hand. While it is not currently accepting further caps, it has asked that people continue to collect and drop them at participating collection centres.