MALVERN, Pa. — Making beauty from waste has become a bit of a theme at Penn State Great Valley. Last spring, the campus hosted the Trashy Women artist collective for an exhibit featuring work by eight regional artists who turn waste materials into art.  

Then in August, the campus unveiled a mural depicting the Penn State Nittany Lion, created from upcycled plastic bottle caps by mosaic studio artist Judith Hokky.  

While the mural isn’t affiliated with the Trashy Women exhibit, the alignment has helped to keep the conversation going.

“The possibilities associated with waste seem to be the talk of the campus,” said Becky Stanko, sustainability and community impact specialist at Penn State Great Valley.   

“With the bottle cap project, we are trying to highlight microplastics, specifically, and what happens to a lot of this waste,” she explained. “Where is our waste really going to end up? Are we ingesting it? Or are we going to use it to make art? I think that’s a cool way of looking at it: We can take what we’ve done and make the best of it.” 

The bottle cap mural is a five-and-a-half-foot square, accompanied by an informative placard created in Great Valley’s engineering lab that explains its origins and meaning. Harley Miles, the campus’ lead maintenance mechanic, handled the installation and even climbed onto the soffit to place bottle caps over the seam.

The piece is now featured prominently in the campus’ conference center, ensuring it will be seen by a diverse range of viewers.  

“We’re trying to find different ways of opening the conversation and reaching a wider audience when it comes to these challenging subjects,” Stanko added.    

The idea for the mural originated when Stanko visited Hokky at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, an intentional community in Phoenixville with a stated mission to “create and maintain a land-based community together with adults with special needs.”   

“We love having opportunities to work with Camphill — you can feel the good vibes there,” said Stanko. “We’re grateful that they’re open to collaborate creatively with us.”  

Hokky is a resident long-term coworker at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, where she has been teaching mosaic for over 10 years. Hokky said she loves using an assortment of tesserae such as glass, tile and stone, but is passionate about using recycled plastic caps as it has the ability to bring about more awareness regarding environmental sustainability. 

The idea for a Penn State-specific bottle cap mural at the Great Valley campus emerged after Stanko fell in love with Hokky’s bottle cap mosaic version of Van Gogh’s "The Starry Night." Hokky shared how she created this piece with fifth graders when she was teaching K-8 visual art in Cleveland, Ohio.

“My students stayed engaged in this piece from start to finish, as they knew it would be a permanent installation in their school,” she said. “They were invested in this project because they knew their work would help raise awareness about the harmful effects of plastic waste.”  

As part of Great Valley’s Earth Day celebration last April, people from Camphill Village joined the campus’ sustainability team and other members of the community for "Caps for a Cause: Transforming Waste into Art."

“It was really fun to turn this project into an engaging activity for our campus,” said Stanko. “For the bottle cap project, we set up tables at the entrance to the building with food and dessert, so you couldn’t walk by without wondering what we were doing. It was wonderful to coordinate a fun event for the campus and community, while also highlighting these larger issues.”  

The mural is comprised of approximately 3,000 caps, including bottle and toothpaste caps, sourced largely from Eco Plastic Products in Wilmington, Delaware. This non-profit organization collects discarded plastic and converts it into useful products such as park benches.  

“We were so grateful to have discovered Eco Plastic Products as we were limited in the number of caps we could gather from family and friends,” said Hokky. She explained that “most recycling centers do not recycle plastic caps because they require a much hotter temperature to melt them down, so more often than not, they end up in landfills.”  

Hokky said that she was thrilled to collaborate with Penn State Great Valley on this project. 

“Any way we can partner with organizations is wonderful as it helps us build relationships,” she said. Hokky said she is looking forward to working with Stanko again next year to create another cap mural for the campus.