The Gaza-based Creative Women Association hosted on Saturday a gallery for children displaying recycled rubbish materials into useful items for household use.

The project entitled "The Environment Club" is funded by the Welfare Association, a local non-government organization, and it was implemented by the help of 150 students from five elementary schools for both genders in the Gaza Strip.

Raw material was used in the creating of items of this gallery including old unwanted trash and plastic.

The cost of the 3-month course project has reached US$34,000, and was supervised by 15 teachers and 5 coordinators distributed as follows: 3 teachers and one supervisor per school.

Alaa El Ghoul, a 10-year-old student and a participant in the project said "I worked in the environmental club and I created items that we can use in our life, I used unwanted plastic bottles to make an artificial tree that can be placed as a natural scene in an office or a home."

He added that he also used unwanted soil and built items that resemble our tradition like the bread mill used to grind wheat and the clay oven we used in the past to bake bread."

The gallery was attended by a vast number of Palestinian public including the parents of children participating in the project and seemed very proud of their children.

The supervisors over this project explained to Xinhua that behind this project lies the objective to transform children's mentality to shift it from being a consuming mentality to a productive one, and here is where the recycling idea comes from.

Tamer Abu Kwaik, the project coordinator, said "Our idea is simple, since we are a consuming society we thought we needed to do something to make our children think how to become reproductive as well."

"Not only consuming the products, but thinking of a way to recycle these products in a creative manner so we can have what is called self-sufficiency," said Abu Kwaik.

(Xinhua News Agency December 27, 2009)