Pat Donahue/Times-EnterpriseApril Penton, left, and Jen Hamilton talk to their campers about what they learned from the bottle caps to benches project and what they learned during the trip last week.

THOMASVILLE — There are 13 new benches around Thomas County, thanks to Thomas University’s Camp STEMtastic.

Camp STEMtastic students collected bottle caps, with the vision of turning the plastic caps into “buddy benches,” places where students sit and are looking for a friend and other students can recognize the need and help that student.

Students had a goal of 2,000 pounds, and collected 2,600 pounds of bottle caps. They brought back 13 benches for use from Green Tree Plastics in Evansville, Indiana.

“Our goal was 1,000 pounds per school system so each school system would end up with a bench,” said April Penton of Thomas University. “And we met it.”

STEMtastic campers combined two programs, A Cap for Benches and the buddy bench program.

“We had the most remarkable thing happen in this community,” Penton said. “People said yes we want to help and we want to be part of the solution.”

Along with collection 2,600 pounds of bottle caps — more than 234,000 caps in total — the students had to sort through the donations to find which caps could be used to make benches. It takes 90 pounds of bottle caps to make a bench.

“Our bottle caps lids have very specific types of plastics in them and all the bottle caps lids cannot be used to make these benches,” said Jen Hamilton, leader for this week’s camp. “We have to know what bottle caps we can use and the chemist showed us to do that, with a mass spectrometer.” 

On their way to Evansville, the 24 campers and six counselors first stopped at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. They arrived at the University of Evansville later that night and visited Green Tree Plastics the next day

Campers made Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, their next stop and spent the night in cabins there and toured the caves the following day.

Their next stop was The Children’s Discovery Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they spent the night and viewed the constellations from the museum’s roof.

On Friday, CampSTEMtastic students returned home and delivered the benches, five each, to the city and county schools systems and also to sponsors First Commerce Credit Union and the Rotary Club. Another bench for TU from the county school system was delivered.