Residents recently used recycled/upcycled materials to create exciting decorative and useful items as part of a friendly competition across SageLife senior living communities.

“We challenged residents at our communities to make projects out of at least 75 percent recycled or upcycled materials,” said Kim Smith, SageLife’s Vice President of Operations. “We were blown away with the results, which included both highly practical items and appealing artistic concepts. More importantly, though, the project turned neighbors into friends as they worked for a common goal and had fun together.”

The Recycling Challenge was part of SageLife’s innovative monthly STEM programming.

“Much of our social and intellectual wellness programming has a liberal arts focus: book clubs, theater outings, and music performances,” said SageLife Founder and President Kelly Andress. “We created a STEM track to serve our more scientific-minded residents, and it’s been a huge success!”

SageLife’s four communities in Pennsylvania — Daylesford Crossing, Echo Lake, Plush Mills, and The 501 at Mattison Estate — all created strong entries.

Straw Hat Bird Houses

The team from Daylesford Crossing in Paoli was extremely resourceful in creating straw hat bird houses.

“We had several hats left over from a springtime Ladies Hat Day at the Devon Horse Show trip and a Western-themed Halloween party,” said Mary Small, Daylesford Crossing’s Life Enrichment Director. “For the bottoms of the houses, we used the lids from our meal containers from a trip to Longwood Gardens. Residents in our Personal Care neighborhood decorated the houses with flowers and craft supplies we already had — there was no need to buy anything new, and the birdhouses are a wonderful reminder of all the fun trips and activities we’ve enjoyed together.”

The bird houses are now home to appreciative feathered friends in the community’s Connections Memory Care courtyard and alongside the communal vegetable garden.

An “Echo”-Friendly Recycled Farmyard

Residents at Echo Lake in Malvern upcycled no-longer-needed materials into an entire farmyard, complete with animals, a barn, and a white split rail fence. 

“Our whole community was very excited about this project, and we received so many donations of materials to recycle that we had to stop our donor drive early,” said Bethany McCardell, Echo Lake’s Life Enrichment Director. “Over time, the exhibit kept growing with more animals, and while we were considering the future of our planet and the importance of recycling, we decided to create a robot who would be responsible for taking care of the farm and animals. So we then needed to create an Echo-Friendly Farmer Robot Control Panel for the exhibit as well.”

Residents in Echo Lake’s Assisted Living and Memory Care neighborhoods also contributed by painting water and soda bottle planters, which added real-life foliage to the faux farm.

Plan(t)ing for the Future

The two vertical gardens created at Plush Mills in Wallingford were true community-wide efforts, with residents, team members, and their families all donating bottles, jugs, wheels, rope, and metal frames to be upcycled into future-forward projects.

The vertical gardens are now home to flowers that were sprouted in Plush Mills’s Personal Care neighborhood.

“This project has really opened our eyes to the devastation plastic has on our environment, so we decided we wanted to take this plastic challenge even further,” said John Small, Plush Mills’s Life Enrichment Director. “We’re using all the leftover plastic supplies that were donated to start our 12-month recycling challenge with NexTrex.”

NexTrex uses 100-percent-recycled soft plastic to produce outdoor decking and construction materials.

“The 12-month challenge will challenge us to collect 1,000 pounds of soft plastic material throughout the year,” said Small. “When we reach that goal, NexTrex will provide us an outdoor bench made out of all the recycled material free of charge!”

501 Junkbot Community

Residents at The 501 at Mattison Estate in Ambler chose to recreate their own community in recycled form. Their creative and colorful diorama of the building — complete with its distinctive portico — incorporated all manner of cast-aside materials, including detergent containers, toilet tissue rolls, medication bottles, straws, pipe, cleaners, soda bottles, and so much more.

“All three of our neighborhoods (independent living, assisted living, and memory care) are represented,” said Joyce Coleman, Life Enrichment Director at The 501. “We are very proud of the finished project!”

Charming touches include a pair of toilet paper roll residents enjoying their balcony, medicine bottle residents out for a walk, a cardboard box community bus, and Lindenwold Castle’s egg carton turrets.

Two other communities — Artisan at Hudson in Hudson, Mass., and Village Crossing at Worman’s Mill, in Frederick, Md. — participated in the Recycling Challenge.

Artisan at Hudson recreated the community’s logo on a canvas using only plastic bottle caps, created three different types of plastic-bottle planters, and designed a trash bin made from plastic bottles lined with a biodegradable corn starch bag.

Village Crossing at Worman’s Mill won the competition by creating wine bottle wind chimes, which the community is selling to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Association’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s in October.

Learn more about SageLife senior living communities.