eFoam helps local school

eFoam is proud to play an active role in the local community and endeavours to support local organisations, schools, charities and businesses where it can. So much so, the team was thrilled to be asked by the children of Arngask Primary School to support them with their DIY outdoor tire seats project.

Arngask’s headteacher, Yvonne, contacted us to share details of the children’s outdoor classroom and explained how the pupils were building comfortable seats out of tyres and plywood to replace the hardwood benches currently in place. These seats would be cushioned using foam cut to size and then covered with linoleum-style table covers to protect them. Yvonne kindly informed us that the school had been donated all the tyres, plywood, paint and table covers and yet were still trying to source the foam in order to complete the seats.

The students at Arngask Primary School sought to create 25 seats and when they contacted eFoam, they had managed to source the correct materials to complete four. The children of Arngask wrote us some great letters to help source some of the remaining foam, requesting for it to be 2 inches thick and cut to sizes of 60cm x 60cm in order for them to cut out 60cm diameter circles used to pad out the seats. The children requested for us to donate whatever foam sheets we could, but given the excellent quality of their letters, we decided to provide them with all the remaining foam they required.

We were thrilled to see how well written the letters were, and how many of the children – many of whom are soon to move to secondary school – were concerned about the comfort and enjoyment of future students. For example, pupil Jessica wanted future students to enjoy the outdoor classroom in comfort, rather than sit on the cold, hard log benches currently in place. We’re also pleased to see that pupil Noah is aware of the waste that is created by many manufacturing companies. He requested for eFoam to donate its scrap foam materials to their project, rather than recycle it into foam offcut products that are usually sold to the public.

Efoam is proud to ensure all offcuts are not sent to landfill but are either recycled into new products and uses or, as seen here, donated to worthy causes.

The pupils at Arngask also kindly sent us some photographs of their DIY seats and have demonstrated how easy it is to recycle common objects and materials into innovative new products. For each seat, the children sourced two regular car tyres and painted each of these in the desired colour before stacking on top of each other.

Should you wish to recreate these; the tyres can be fixed together with either strong universal adhesive glue, or with an industrial nail gun. Using plywood, the teachers and students cut out circular shapes (60cm in diameter) and did the same from the 2-inch-thick foam sheets we supplied. These are then stuck together and then covered with the appropriate waterproof material - for both decoration and protection – and applied to the tyre stacks to complete the seat.

We want to thank the pupils of Angarsk for getting in touch with us – we were very happy to help with such an excellent project!

Congratulations to all the pupils and teachers involved, from all of us at eFoam.