- Temple Shir Shalom installed a TREX bench made from recycled plastic bags in its garden through a community collaboration.
- Sara Nussel of Southwest United Methodist Church leads the effort to place such benches at various local places of worship.
- The recycled benches are produced by TREX, a company in Winchester, VA, using 95% recycled and reclaimed materials.
- Local faith groups, residents of Oak Hammock, and a clothing store contributed plastic waste to support the bench project and received certificates.
You wouldn’t think piles of plastic that should have been destined for a landfill could be transformed into a place of reflection in a garden spot.
But that’s just what happened at Temple Shir Shalom in a community collaboration that turned soft plastic waste into something lasting, a TREX bench made of recycled materials for the synagogue’s garden.
“Besides keeping plastic out of the landfill, it is an easy, doable project by everyone, and it gets everyone to think about the amount of non-biodegradable waste that surrounds our lives, said Ellen Siegel, part of the Green Team task force at Shir Shalom and a climate speaker specialist with the CLEO institute…