While most people throw away bottle lids when they are done with them, a Christchurch man sees the value they hold, and collects every lid he can get his hands on.
Inside Chris Koch’s garage lies about a million bottle cap lids waiting to be reused in art, jewelry, or his latest creation, Liddy Boards, which is being tested at Riccarton Elementary School.
Koch collects community bottle lids at the New Brighton Seaside Market and uses them to reduce plastic waste and raise awareness about how things can be recycled.
He moved with his wife, Vicky, from Germany to New Zealand eight years ago and they started their business Poly Lab NZ just before Covid hit.
“It’s almost like a Covid lock-in project … we started with no money, so basically just in our spare time,” he said.
Koch was inspired to start making items from recycled bottle lids by a group in Holland who started a precious plastic movement, recycling plastic in small quantities.
He was also frustrated with the amount of waste produced after participating in beach cleaning around New Brighton.
Koch made his first Liddy Board for his five-year-old twins, Mateo and Rosalie, who had just started school, as a way for them to practice.
However, they used it more to make patterns and pictures, which led Koch to believe that it could be good for fine motor skills.
It gave him the idea to implement the boards in primary schools and donated one to the school to act as a test run.
Koch received a text from the librarian saying that the students use it every day, mostly playing imaginative games, but also a lot of pattern making and conversations about throwing away bottle lids.
Koch said the feedback is encouraging and he thinks the boards can be beneficial for children with special needs who may have difficulty concentrating and sitting still.
“It’s a calming activity for them and to be creative and have the kids start talking about recycling and bottle caps, that’s pretty cool,” he said.
Koch makes the planks of woodcuts he collects from carpentry, and puts them through a machine called a tabletop CNC router that shaves off the plate, leaving small cylinders for the bottle lids to slide on.
He designs the boards using a computer program that is then cut into the machine by a router, which allows for precise shapes that will be difficult to do by hand.
Koch, an air-conditioning technician, works four days a week and dedicates Fridays and Saturdays to Poly Lab NZ.
He started with a small sandwich printer, melted off the lids of the bottles to form them into jewelry and art pieces, but now has four large sandwich printers and always has two running.
“I never use any new material when I make something, it is recycled, reused, reused. It’s all about the circular economy – right. ” he said.
“I believe we can do so much with all these wonderful materials, it’s very high quality stuff they put out there, even the bottle’s lids, it’s food grade plastic and they’m only used once, so there’s nothing wrong with that. ”
Koch washes the bottle lids by putting them through a double cycle in the washing machine and uses about 150 for a shelf, depending on its size.
He said the feedback he had received so far about the Liddy Boards was “really encouraging” and he hoped to do more to eventually start selling.
“It motivates me to keep going and do more. “At the moment we were all a bit sick and inflation is rising and the Ukraine war and all that so it’s a bit of a strange time,” he said.
“Sometimes I’m a little demotivated, but then this kind of gets me going again.”