These Bell Island students are turning trash into art — and learning about sustainability

Photo: Ife Alaba/CBC. Retrieved from cbc.ca. Excerpt from cbc.ca

How many bottle caps do you think it takes to make a mural the size of three plywood sheets?

That is exactly what students at St. Augustine’s Elementary recently decided to find out, with the help of environmental artist Brian Burke.

The only elementary school on Bell Island, in Newfoundland’s Conception Bay, St Augustine’s is celebrating its 40th anniversary and to commemorate the milestone, students are building a mural made out of bottle caps.

Through funding from ArtsSmarts — a government program that incorporates art and artists in school curricula — the school began working on the mural in December, with the students sorting and ironing thousands and thousands of bottle caps.

Before embarking on the larger mural, students started small, practising by using the bottle caps to make their initials, and once they mastered that, they started on the harder stuff.