CAPitalizing on RE-USE

"The necessaries of life for man may be distributed under food, clothing, shelter, and fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Assignment: All items used to build your bottle-cap model must be salvaged or biodegradable. Expect to justify all of your materials through the lens of "Radical Simplicity".

Above: The final iteration of our product proposal




























Above: Beginning to build our final proposal





























Above: First iterations

For this project the assignment was to create something functional or decorative using bottle caps and other biodegradable materials as a proposal for Terracycle's challenge to create a marketable product reusing bottle caps. Our first step as a class was to create an ideation charette of 15 idea sketches. After this we paired up and began working. Molly and I had several ideas we felt merited an iteration. Our first iterations were a shower caddy and a drink coaster. The shower caddy was not at all what we had hoped for and immediately abandoned that idea. While we liked the shape and colors of the drink coaster, we felt that perhaps it was a bit tacky. While I liked the idea of using the entire bottle cap in its original form, we were challenged by our professors to be more innovative. We bounced ideas around for a while before finally deciding to create a chandelier of sorts. We built a wire frame out of wire coat hangers and used a hot glue gun to secure everything. Our defense for using glue was that we found an environmentally friendly glue called EcoBond which aggressively bonds to plastics and other materials. We coved several bottle caps with the aluminum from Diet Sun Drop cans, from which we drew our color scheme from, to add more interest. To create the circular shapes we slit the edge of the bottle cap to create a flower shape and then using scissors, cut these edges off to leave only the top of the cap. These were then glued together to resemble a honeycomb circle. While this project was rather time consuming, due to having to cut all of the bottle caps, and took roughly 8 hours to create, we feel that it was worth the effort.