LYNN — The new community bike trail between Spencer and Cottage streets that officially opened in November will see new benches installed in the coming months.
The benches that will be installed are made out of 100-percent, recycled-plastic waste that was collected throughout the city.
Before the pandemic, Lisa Wallace, who founded the Community Path of Lynn Coalition which has been pushing for the bike-path project for years, put out a call to the city to collect bottle caps.
Numerous organizations and businesses in the city — including Girl Scouts of the USA, Lynn Public Schools, the teachers union, and city leaders — helped to collect more than 500 pounds of bottle caps.
The original plan was to send the bottle caps to a company in Wisconsin, which would turn them into benches. Unfortunately the facility burned down, so Wallace was unsure of what to do.
“I had hundreds of pounds of bottle caps, and then the pandemic hit, so everything was kind of put on pause,” Wallace said.
She began cleaning the bottle caps with the help of students in the community, but when the pandemic shut everything down, Wallace decided to do it on her own.
Wallace is a carpenter and has a lot of experience building her own home and furniture. She was researching the process and necessary tools to turn bottle caps into benches when she came across Lynn native Nathan Gray.
Gray leads EcoBricks — a project that operates by turning plastic into bricks which can be used to build furniture, walkways, garden walls, and even buildings — which came to Lynn last year.
Gray, who has since moved out of the city, has a garage where he stores hundreds of pounds of plastic to be reused and made into products.
Wallace reached out to Gray to see if he could take on the project of making the benches for the bike trail out of the collected bottle caps. He recently completed the first bench.
The process of making the benches begins by cleaning and drying the bottle caps, which are then separated into different types of plastic and colors. The caps are then shredded with a machine, and those shreddings are put into an extruder that melts them down and forms the melted plastic into different building materials — in this case, the planks for the bench.
The complete process of cleaning the caps and melting them into planks takes about an hour, Gray said.
Making this bench, however, took years because it was Gray’s first time doing so. His process included figuring out what machines were needed and then finding someone to build the machines.
“We loved it and are now doing a lot of other products, like bowls,” Gray said. “It’s great to be able to do all these different things out of plastic waste that’s keeping it out of the environment and oceans and our waste stream.”
The installation of the first bench, which consists of 37 pounds of plastic waste, hasn’t been scheduled yet because Wallace wants to wait until there isn’t as much snow so they can host a community event for it.
“When you engage your community in a project, it gives them a sense of ownership and pride,” Wallace said. “Rather than just having a bike path, I figured we could make it something more than that and put benches and parks.”
The Community Path of Lynn Coalition has pushed for the bike path for the last 10 years and has kept up with cleaning the train tracks of the former route of the Saugus Branch Railroad, which had passenger service from 1853 to 1958, but has since been vacant.
“The tracks were gross for a really long time… It became a dumping ground,” Wallace said. “I thought it would be a great idea to have them turned into something.”
Wallace hopes the bike trail can eventually be connected to downtown, to increase pedestrian traffic to businesses there and continue interacting with neighborhoods.
Given the success of turning the bottle caps into benches, Wallace hopes there can be some type of workshop on this so students can see how important it is to recycle and what plastic can be recycled into.
“It’s just amazing to see,” Wallace said.
Those interested in having their plastic waste recycled into something can visit https://homefactory.us/on-line-store.
