One of Ballarat’s heritage trams has had something of a spruce-up - decorated with thousands of hand-made flowers, recycled from plastic waste.
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It’ll be on display during the Begonia Festival, across the long weekend, ferrying passengers back and forth around Lake Wendouree.
It’s been an immense journey to get to this point, according to coordinator Pamela Waugh - hundreds of volunteers attended 40 workshops to put it all together.
“We didn’t start out doing a recycling project, it was more doing a floral tram, and when i was researching how they made it originally - paper flowers made out of supermarket bags - I thought, this is it,” she enthused.
“I had 6000 individual flowers that arrived, I had no idea what was coming, so it was a matter of sorting into colour palettes then arranging it.
“We painted the plastic bottles, cut them, moulded them, glued them together, each one has been handled about 20 times.”
The tram is an homage to the floral trams from 1938 and ‘39, where the Lucas Girls - workers at the Lucas clothing factory - decorated trams with flowers.
One was in honour of Ballarat first switching on electric lighting.
Ms Waugh said she hoped the flowers would get more use than just the festival.
“I’d like to bring them out again for SpringFest, and if they’re still usable, next year as well,” she said.
“We actually have an offer from one of the recycling plants, so when we are done with them, they’ll turn them into furniture.
“It’s really positive, because as I kept saying to people, you do have to accept that ultimately they might end up in landfill, but someone’s come forward with another solution, and that’s even better.”
The Begonia Festival begins March 9.
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