RNLI’s plastic bottle Christmas tree is a symbol of saving lives at sea

The RNLI has opted for a Christmas tree made from plastic bottles this year to symbolise an award-winning floatation device created to save lives at sea.

The tree pays homage to the ‘Bottle Buoy’, a minimum-cost floatation device that allows three plastic bottles to be attached to a central hub to be used as public rescue equipment or for swimming instruction.

The device was developed by a design team from Bournemouth University (BU) and the RNLI and won in the ‘Technology Category’ at the first ever Honouring Excellence in Rescue Operations (HERO) Awards from the International Maritime Rescue Federation.

Demonstrator in Model-Making at BU, Gary Underwood, was part of the team that helped develop the Bottle Buoy.

“The BU Workshops try to get involved with real-life projects and design innovation as much as possible. Our prototypes have helped many local and national businesses and entrepreneurs develop their concepts into commercial products, and the experience we gain from working on these projects feeds back to the students in our teaching,” he commented.

As discarded plastic drinks bottles are often in abundance in many low resource environments, instructions and a simple template has been developed to allow the bottle buoy to be produced in the local community using items that could be found easily.

Production development and testing has been undertaken in Bangladesh and in the workshops at Bournemouth University.

The Bottle Buoy is now in use in Bangladesh and will undergo further testing before a final resource manual is made open source.