Sherae Honeycutt

STE. GENEVIEVE, MO (KFVS) – Original Post

In Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, two groups are working together to make something new out of something most of us throw away.

The Public Health Department and the Rotary Club are collecting plastic soda bottle caps that can’t be recycled. Once they get thousands of pounds of them together, they’re going to make the bottle caps into park benches and display them across town.

“This is the seventeen hundred, thirty-five pounds of caps that we’re taking to be recycled into benches that will be placed around the county,” Sandra Bell said.

Bell started the program with the Rotary Club.

Rotary Club President Jerry Bertholdt said the program took off two years ago.

“It started small,” he said. “We were just passing out fliers. We used social media a little bit. We got with our local school districts and it’s just grown from there. Our recycle center donates a lot of these caps. This particular trailer will have about 3,000 pounds of caps in it in just a relatively six-month period of time.”

The benches are made in Evansville, Indiana and each one costs $300.

“It sends a message to anyone who comes and visits, that we are really trying to save the environment and to keep the world clean and do something that’s friendly,” Bell said.

Not only are the benches downtown, but they are at schools, at the hospital and even inside the grocery store.

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t repurpose something that could be thrown away into something better,” Bell said. “People need to sit in places around the town, and we could purchase benches for a lot of money made by a manufacturer, or we can send a message that we really are into saving the environment. We really want to keep the world clean.”

Once they get this round of benches back, there will be 26 more throughout the county.