Last week Miss Watkins announced the winners of the Year 9 Enterprise Challenge, also known as ‘The Business Bin Challenge!’

The idea was to create a new saleable product from recycled or upcycled items/materials students can find at home! Did the aspiring entrepreneurs have the imagination and business acumen to create an upcycled money maker? We all create rubbish but what if we could make money out of that rubbish? Lots of waste products can get ‘upcycled’ into new saleable items.  Not only are these products profitable they use materials that would have otherwise been wasted. 

Students teamed up and had to come up with an innovative product using recycled or upcycled items. Then they had to develop a brand name and logo and film a 60 second pitch video! All teams had to think about the practicality, usefulness and commercial viability of their products.

The winners were Addy M-S and Charlotte M with their Aurora and Mercury Candle Company, which creates candles from old, recycled soap bottles found around the house.

Here’s how they came up with the idea:

“We are the winners of the Business Bin Enterprise challenge set up by Miss Watkins, the Head of Economics. We designed and produced Aurora and Mercury Candle Company products which involved using old recycled soap bottles that would’ve otherwise been thrown out and made them into luxury candles that are of very high quality. We came up with this idea through social media in which we saw a video of a person making candles out of recycled beer bottles. However, this entailed using fire and lots of hairspray to attempt to break the beer bottle in half and it unfortunately didn’t work.  After this challenge we resorted to using old, recycled soap bottles that we had found around our houses, which we could then, safely cut with a knife and use as sophisticated and bespoke candle holders. 

So how did we make these oil and paraffin-free candles? The first step was to cut the old recycled soap bottles in half using a knife and a chopping board and use the bottom half as the candle holder. Next we placed a white glue dot in the centre of the bottom of the soap bottle and subsequently, placed a wick on top of the glue dot and used a metal holder to keep the wick in the centre when the wax is poured. The third step was to melt the organic and handmade soy wax in a wax melting jug preferably on a stove and stir with a metal rod until the wax has fully melted. Finally we poured the melted soy wax into the recycled soap bottle and we let it sit for an hour. 

So how did we find the process of making the candles? We faced some difficult challenges along the way and had to adapt our product slightly to our circumstances to make the candle the highest quality that it could be. Due to COVID-19 and being in lockdown at the time, it made the assembling process more strenuous and it meant that we had to become more independent when creating these organic and toxin-free candles. 

We hope this article has inspired others to be creative, especially in uncertain times and to put your innovative skills to the test, as sometimes it is important to take risks and try new things!”

Well done to Addy and Sophia, who were awarded with a certificate and some Deliveroo vouchers last Thursday!