Recycling is always on our minds at Charters School, and this week the Food Technology and Design Technology Departments did their bit to reduce, reuse and recycle.

Mrs Christine Innes and Mrs Rebecca Herbert Food Technology Technicians explained, “The Food Technology Department has an amazing array of up-to-date resources to enable our students to achieve top grades at both GCSE and A Level and during a recent “spring clean”, it was felt that over 100 old aluminium pots and pans were no longer needed. A selection of saucepans was given to The Maine Centre, the School’s pastoral hub, but the vast majority were taken to our Design Technology Department to be melted down and reused for students’ Resistant Materials projects.”

The Design Technology Team prepared the pans by removing the handles sawing the pans into quarters which weighed a total of approximately16kg, before being dropped into the school’s crucible. The crucible reaches temperatures of between 650°C – 700°C and only takes a few minutes to melt the metal. Once the metal has melted, the liquid aluminium is poured into moulds and left to cool, with the resulting ingots stored as a supply for the students’ Design Technology, Resistant Materials projects. It has been calculated that the school saved around £64 and best of all we have not added to the huge stocks of rubbish being sent to landfill sites.

The picture shows the melted aluminum being poured from the crucible into the ingots by Mrs Innes and Mrs Herbert