Reported by: Karen Li
Posted by: Karen Li
As part of our ongoing commitment to sustainability and community support efforts, we have launched a new project to collect used crayons from local communities and help distribute to children in need.
Every year, millions of crayons are discarded, most of which end up in landfills. And because they are made mainly of paraffin wax, a petroleum-based material that doesn’t break down, these crayons stay there for decades, contributing to the already large problem of environmental waste. Collecting and repurposing these used crayons can help limit what goes into our landfills and encourage more sustainable practices within our community. At the same time, projects like this show children how everyday items can be reused and provide affordable, recycled art materials that inspire creativity and learning
The initial plan was to ship the crayon to the Crayon Initiative where they melt down used crayons and form them into new ones, providing free art supplies for hospitalized children. You can learn more about their process and mission on their website at thecrayoninitiative.org.
However during the sorting process, we discovered that many of these donated crayons were barely used at all. Melting these crayons would have been unnecessarily wasteful, as they still had plenty of usable life and were in almost perfect condition. So we decided to change and add on to our original plan.
We did this by first adding a step to our plan where we would sort out all the crayons by their usage. All of the broken and heavily used crayons would follow our original plan and get sent to the Crayon Initiative, however for the less used crayons we decided that we would repurpose them ourselves, before redistributing them to our very local community.
To hold and help redistribute these crayons, Karen, the leader of the Recycling Initiatives, proposed the idea of utilizing tissue boxes to make a new packaging for the crayons. This approach reinforced the project’s sustainability goals by helping give another discarded item a new purpose.
Tianlu, the leader of the Arts in Action group, then helped design the original crayon box prototypes, setting the foundation for the style and structure of the box. Following this initial design, Karen along with another team member, Melody simplified the concept to make it easier to produce. They then also made four complete boxes based on the updated design and filled each of them with their own collection of sorted crayons.
Through teamwork and creativity, we were able to transform discarded crayons and household materials into products that can serve a new purpose and help inspire creativity for those in our community. This project was a great learning experience and is far from being over. In the future we plan on hosting more of these events so that we can help provide free art supplies to more children in need.
Total crayon collected: 12lb
Crayon Volunteer hours:
Karen Li (Event Leader): 3 hours
Kathleen Jiang (Event Leader): 3 hours
Tingfei Li: 3 hours
Catherine Fang: 3 hours
Ellin Wang: 2 hours
Evan Hou: 2 hours
Melody Zhang: 2 hours
Tianlu Zhou: 2 hours
