15k Bottle Caps
Wait! Before you start here…check out this little backstory on how this project came to be in the environmental arts program I managed. How did I come to manage that program? Here’s a bit on that.
Because ArtWorks is a professional development organization at its core, I interviewed about 20-30 teen applicants before we hired them for the arts internships. When I asked them why they were interested in the environmental internship, nearly all of the students said they hated seeing trash in their neighborhoods and wanted to help make their environments look nicer. I drove around a lot for work meetings, and like these young people, the trash on each freeway on- or off-ramp drove me crazy. I had a vision to create some sort of public assemblage artwork out of trash, hygiene be damned, and felt like this could be an opportunity to do that.
In the 1940s and 50s, highway construction became a top federal priority in America to accommodate the booming automotive industry and population growth. State and federal highway officials created buildout plans for Black neighborhoods, where land acquisitions were generally cheaper and political opposition was minimal. New highways led to the demolition of housing units and displacement of residents in these communities. The homes that survived only reduced in property value and their residents became exposed to elevated levels of air, water, and noise pollution, which is still disproportionately the case today.
A study by Keep America Beautiful found that there are 2,857 pieces of litter per mile of roads in the United States, and that freeways and expressways have over 6x as much litter as local roads. Did you know…Milwaukee receives only enough funding from the state to cover one citywide expressway clean-up per year?
The same study found that 90% of Americans agree litter is a problem in their community, yet we still need to invest so much time, labor, and dollars into something simple like picking up people’s trash on the roadside. There is clearly a gap in logic here, and our interns and program partners at ArtWorks recognized that. After a couple of Earth month cleanups, though, we soon learned that the condition of roadside trash wasn’t going to work…also hygiene (despite my ambitious vision).
So, we came up with the idea for a mosaic made entirely of plastic bottle caps, and I must say right off the bat that the artist leading the interns in this program, Jenni Reinke, deserves a ton of credit for bringing it to fruition.
The mosaic would serve as an entrance sign for Green Tech Station, a new development led by our program partners, Northwest Side Community Development Corporation (NWSCDC) and Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, and the City of Milwaukee. (Now fully constructed, GTS is an outdoor environmental education classroom, consisting of 440 freshly planted trees, a native prairie, constructed wetland, and several other forms of green infrastructure; the entire space, formerly a three-acre brownfield, can collect over 100k gallons of stormwater.)
The teens designed a flyer to announce our collection goal of 5,000 bottle caps, and we set up a vibrantly painted rain barrel inside Outpost Natural Foods, a local co-op grocery store, to serve as a plastic collection point. We had three collection sites total, downtown and on the North and South sides of Milwaukee, yet we (the adults) did, admittedly, feel 5k was a very ambitious goal because our timeline was extremely tight.
Four of the interns’ water-themed benches
While we waited for bottle caps to – hopefully – start pouring in, Jenni and the interns managed to crank out ten painted water-themed benches for Green Tech Station in about six weeks. Each bench was distinctly unique, painted by youth with a wide range of artistic backgrounds. The content was also wonderfully diverse, including coral reefs, littering, freshwater fish, “water” in different languages, and water-related jokes. The rapid hussle on the benches turned out to be just a little practice for what turned into an enormous project with the bottle cap mosaic.
Living near Outpost, I swung by every few days during the six-week collection period, finding the rain barrel about 5% full. I’d sort through the garbage – literally because many people thought the rain barrel was a trash can – and bring the plastic treasures home to clean them and count them (for reporting purposes). When I stopped by Outpost the Monday after our collection deadline, my plan to count the bottle caps was immediately shot because I found the barrel nearly overflowing with plastic bottle caps.
I was overwhelmed with disbelief and even got a little emotional. This was a 60-gallon rain barrel filled to the brim with colorful plastic caps from strangers’ everyday lives. I needed to tell someone – the incredible feeling of seeing this level of contribution to our small nonprofit. But it was hard to describe to others, mostly because this incredible contribution was literal garbage. Plus, Outpost’s customers were already confused as to why I was digging into – what looked like – a trash can.
I was emotional because it was the strongest feeling of community that I’ve ever experienced. And all of this was remote community engagement, a pretty paradoxical technique of collaboration that all parties involved in the project needed to learn (though a year of COVID gave us a jumpstart on that). But it all still felt so personal as I was digging through these pieces of plastic, each feeling like a separate glimpse into people’s lives. My favorite part: someone left us a note who said that our project inspired her and her husband to pick up bottle caps that they came across along Lake Michigan and in parks.
Our two other collection sites also accumulated far more plastic than we had anticipated, and Penzey’s Spices donated about a dozen very large boxes of recycled plastic caps. I received inquiries from a woman in Antigo, who ended up serving as a very dedicated volunteer, and a couple in Lake Geneva, who donated a 40 gallon bin of plastic caps and ended up leading the installation of the mosaic on the interns’ final day. We had so much support.
From there, the project moved into the “overwhelm” territory. We suddenly had tens of thousands of bottle caps and Jenni and the interns needed to start a design for the mosaic ASAP. (The intern team came up with a beautiful design that illustrated Lincoln Creek emptying into the Milwaukee River, then expanding into Lake Michigan.) But they needed to know how much of each color we had, but to know that, we needed to sort these piles of caps, and to do that, we needed a ton of volunteers.
We also needed to order lumber, a less-than-ideal material, at the time, for our limited budget because wood prices had nearly quadrupled due to pandemic supply chain issues. Regardless, we stuck to the plan to order 16 pieces of 4x4’ plywood, which the intern team primed, painted, and varnished – already an enormous task. Jenni coordinated with dozens of volunteers to help sort colors and drill each individual bottle cap onto the wood. We estimated, based on the number of screws Jenni purchased, everyone adhered about 15k bottle caps for this mosaic.
There was a lot of trial and error just executing the mosaic itself, but when it came time for installation, we entered a realm I would have never expected. Someone (smartly) asked an 11th hour question about the structural integrity of the chain link fence on which we were installing 16 very heavy plywood panels. We wound up in conversations with local engineers about proper installation hardware and fencing experts about wind velocity.
The experts told us we needed to determine the proper distance between each panel to make sure the mosaic could withstand harsh Wisconsin winters, which came down to a level of physics that we weren’t prepared to tackle, especially within our tight timeline. So, we acknowledged that this aspect of the project was beyond our immediate level of comprehension and we simply needed to make some judgment calls and move on. (It’s still standing strong.)
The unveiling of the mosaic was a very special day, not only seeing this large-scale work of art that such a small team created, but also being at Green Tech Station with the volunteers, residents, community partners, youth, artists, and donors who made it happen. It was truly, in all ways, a community art project.
The next cohort of teens came through in 2022 for the second installment of the year-long environmental arts program. I told them several times that if I died tomorrow, I’d be happy because of what me and all the collaborators on that mosaic project were able to accomplish, as a community and within the community. They would make all the stereotypical judgmental teenager faces at me when I said it (I do realize it’s a weird comment), but it’s fine because they would be feeling all those feels too if they’d experienced it. And the best part was that they would experience it, because if all goes according to plan, the environmental arts program I created will continue to beautify those thousands of bottle caps for the city in the coming years.
Video courtesy of Michael Timm from Reflo
Now, I’ve shared where the 30th Street Corridor region has been and how the environmental arts program contributed to the much needed ecological work in the community. It’s important to share also the work that was also happening shortly before and during the project, and big plans to come. Follow me to learn about the eco progress.
