As part of a community service project to earn her Bronze Award in Girl Scouts, Naomi created an 8' x 8' art mural using approximately 4,500 bottle caps. For 2 months, she collected bottle caps from friends, family, Friendship Community Church, and the Oxford Y for Now. She also asked The Donoho School and C.E. Hanna Elementary School to hold a bottle cap contest to see which class in each school could collect the most bottle caps. At the end of 3 weeks, Naomi had more than 32,000 bottle caps. Once the bottle caps were collected from everyone, she sorted the caps by color and then washed them in laundry bags in the washing machine with bleach. In the mean time, Naomi drew and painted the bottle cap picture onto two full sheets of plywood. After the painting was complete, she, along with her Girl Scout troop and their parents spent two Sundays (approximately 44 hours of labor) individually screwing the bottle caps into the plywood to create a unique piece of recycled art.
Naomi chose bottle caps to create an art piece because she is passionate about art, recycling, and helping to conserve the Earth's resources. Later, her choice of bottle caps became even more special because she learned that most recyclers do not recycle the bottle caps themselves, even when put into recycling bins. In the process of bottling goods, bottle caps have chemicals put on them that make cleaning them costly and inefficient for time management when recycling.
It is Naomi's hope that her project will inspire others to become more aware of what they can do to reuse what others may think of as "trash" in unique ways in order to better protect the environment.
The mural is currently on display at the Oxford Public Library.
