How Sunday school students are giving new life to plastic bottle caps

Sunday school students at West River United Church in Cornwall,P.E.I., are learning to give new life to old plastics.

Students there of all ageshave been cleaning up ditches, yards and picking up garbage around their community as part of a greater lesson about taking care of the environment.

This isn't garbage, why are we throwing this away? How can we do better? Andrea Rogers

And now they've taken the lead on a special project: creating a huge piece of art out of old bottle caps.

"This is theirs. I personally have not glued a single bottle cap to this art piece and neither have any of the teachers," saidAndrea Rogers, the church's family and youth ministry coordinator.

The project beganafter one of the teachers found a bag of bottle caps in the church.Teachers andstudents figured there must be something to do with them instead of throwing them out.

That's when they had the idea to create a mural.They looked at several images online of possible art pieces and the students chose one ofEarth with a range of different coloured hands reaching toward it.

'Leave it better'

"They really had control over that and then were involved in the entire process from sorting the caps into colours, making sure they were clean and then painting and drawing the image on to the large piece of cardboard and now gluing them on," Rogers said.

Throughout November, the church put out several calls on Facebook for people in the community to donatebottle caps for the project.

After hours of careful work, the1.2 metre, or four feet, squaremural is now almost complete.

"Each hand is a different colour to represent cultural diversity and the inclusion that we want to embody and live out in our own lives," Rogers said.

Having the students take charge of the project like this has taught them allabout repurposingplasticsand other waste, Rogers said.

"It's that we can look at this piece of garbage and think 'this isn't garbage, why are we throwing this away? How can we do better?'" she said.

"It's really teaching them to pay attention to our environment as well.We're creating the world for them and they're taking that on and saying 'this is ours. We want to leave it better than we found it.'"

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