Two Cherry Hill Girl Scouts added a splash of color to the Cherry Hill Public Library’s children’s section last Monday while also helping the environment.
Lauren Covert and Michala Jarvis, Girl Scouts with Troop No. 30676 and freshmen at Cherry Hill High School East, presented a colorful bottle cap mural to the Cherry Hill Public Library last Monday. The presentation is the culmination of months of hard work as the girls try to earn the Girl Scout Silver Award.
The Silver Award is the highest achievement for a Girl Scout cadette. To earn this award, cadettes must complete a Take Action project within their community.
For their project, Covert and Jarvis wanted to positively impact the environment within Cherry Hill.
“We saw what was happening to our environment and how much people really didn’t know about recycling at school,” Jarvis said. “So we wanted to help educate people about it.”
While researching a specific area to focus on, the girls discovered an interesting fact about plastic caps found on items such as drink bottles.
“Bottle caps are not recyclable because they’re made up of various plastics,” Covert said. “They can’t be melted down because they’re made up of different plastics with different melting points. They can’t be reused again.”
The girls decided to revolve their Silver Award project around bottle caps. The project included two aspects. They would collect bottle caps within the community and use them to create a piece of art. They would also hold a program for kids to teach them about recycling.
Covert and Jarvis got to work in the spring collecting bottle caps. In addition to collecting them individually, they got help from Sustainable Cherry Hill, Girl Scouts of Southern New Jersey and family members. The girls ended up collecting thousands of caps of all colors and sizes.
“We collected thousands of bottle caps,” Covert said. “Our garage was full of them. It took up half of our garage.”
The girls collected so many different colors, they decided making a mural would be best. They decided to create a picture of a tree with a rainbow of colors surrounding it.
“We looked through a lot of different things,” Jarvis said. “We looked online at what other people had done, and we decided to make the tree we made because we thought we could involve all of the bottle caps.”
Sorting the caps took longer than actually creating the mural. The girls had to enlist some help to complete the sorting.
“We had to sort them all out and then washed them,” Covert said. “I contracted my cousins to help me out because I was away for a month at camp. They helped us sort out our bottle caps.”
Putting the caps together in a mural was challenging as well. The girls not only had small caps from drink bottles, but also caps as large as ones found on peanut butter jars.
“With the bottle caps, we had to start out with the tree part of it,” Covert said. “All of the rest of the bottle caps would conform with the tree.”
Prior to completing the mural, the girls held an event at the Cherry Hill Public Library called “A Twist on Recycling.” The library invited Covert and Jarvis to host the program. The Scouts taught kids in first to third grade about what kind of items could be recycled. The event was interactive, and each kid got to make a craft project with some of the caps the Scouts collected.
The girls said the event was very important in spreading the message about proper recycling.
“We’re trying to impact the environment but also impact the people we taught,” she said. “So we’re trying to impact them into changing what they do and teaching other people.”
“We wanted to make it sustainable by teaching children so that they would go home and change what they do in their household,” Covert said.
To thank to the library for working with them on the project, Covert and Jarvis donated the mural to the youth services department. The mural is sitting above a mantle near the front of the children’s area on the second floor.
Covert and Jarvis’ work toward earning the Silver Award isn’t finished yet. They will be spending the next two weeks completing a report on their experience.
Both girls also still have lots of community service ahead of them and are already looking forward to going for their Girl Scout Gold Awards, the highest achievement for Girl Scouts, in the coming years.
