1. caps as a teachable moment

As a father of two and a founding member of The Oaks School Green Committee I am always on the lookout for teachable “green” moments. A plastic bottle cap is one of my favorites: every cap represents a bottle of some manufactured product. Shampoo and catchup are used up in a matter or days or weeks, but a single-serving bottle of orange juice is gone in a couple minutes. Meanwhile, the bottles have lifespans a thousand times longer.

Of course it’s great to recycle all these bottles, but I also started collecting the caps to bear witness to just how many an average household goes through in a year. It was incredible! My family tries hard to live lightly but we were pitching 3 to 5 caps in the pile every day!

I shared my experiment with others and the idea of paying attention to how many caps and products we each burn through really stuck. On several occasions I had a big bag of caps handed to me by someone who couldn’t stop thinking about it and wanted to add to my collection.

In anticipation of creating some kind of art with the caps, I washed and sorted them by color. One unexpected bonus was that it laid bare how much of certain products we used. I carried a reusable water bottle with me every day, but I also drank a single-serving bottle of orange juice at lunch. Once I saw how many caps were from juice, I decided that was unacceptable and vowed not to drink juice at work.

2. caps as art

After collecting for a year, I wanted to share the results with my school. I decided to make an artistic statement with the caps, something beautiful from something ugly, while teaching about consumption and waste and manufacturing and lifespan. If caps symbolized waste, and waste of many kinds — especially greenhouse gasses — cause disproportionate suffering and compromised quality of life for the poor and underprivileged, then was it too much to suggest that paying attention to caps, and waste, was a movement towards social justice and peace?

3. caps as animation

Cap and Trade has become part of the language of international climate negotiations, with fierce debate on all sides. Regardless of the politics and policy, the broad notion of humans choosing to put a cap on their CO2 emissions — or on any aspect of our exploding growth for that matter — is central to the basics of sustainability.

In this animation, each bottle cap represents a molecule of CO2, drifting silently into the atmosphere. The accumulation accelerates until the levels reach the danger point: 350ppm.