Mural helps create recycling awareness
ST. ANTHONY — Can art create better waste management?
The Norpen Regional Service Board is experimenting with ways to use art to encourage recycling and to find creative new uses for items that are normally tossed away. To help create awareness around recycling, former waste was turned into art in a summer youth project, says Joanna Pohl, Norpen’s research, programs and development co-ordinator.
The Roddickton-bide Arm recreation team, with the help of the Norpen Regional Service Board, helped youth create a colourful mural using bottle caps. Students from White Hills Academy and members of local communities collected the bottle caps and brought them in for the community art program, appropriately shortened to CAP, to use. The mural was created as part of the board’s Recycle the Rock program, which focuses on creating new uses for items regularly discarded.
Pohl says the purpose of the program is to change people’s perception of what is waste and what still has value.
“If a bottle cap can be used for art, what else can be reused?” she said.
Pohl said the project creates community engagement and awareness around recycling and waste management strategies.
The Recycle the Rock program kicked off at the Iceberg Festival in St. Anthony, where a mural featured an iceberg and a whale. The Roddickton-bide mural, designed by Pohl, featured a moose, which Pohl says was “appropriate for the moose capital of the world.”
Pohl met with the summer team leaders at the Roddickton-bide Recreation Centre for a workshop on creating the mural, and the staff and youth took it from there. More than one-and-a-half shrimp bags full of bottle caps were used to create the mural.
The Norpen Regional Services Board is a grassroots, nonprofit program.
“Many people think we are government funded. But we are not,” Pohl said. “People really want to recycle and we’re trying to make it work and recover our costs through the recycling program.”
The bottle cap mural is on display at the Green Moose Interpretive Centre. The board plans to create other murals and to involve every school in its territory in making one. The board also offers a workshop package for anyone interested in doing a mural of their own.