Lebanese environmental activist Caroline Chaptini has kept herself busy during the coronavirus pandemic in a rather unusual way: by putting together the world's largest bottle cap mosaic entirely by herself.
Her artwork, which was created in a public park in Miziara, in north Lebanon, spans 196.94 square metres, breaking the previous Guinness World Record of 108.568sqm achieved last year in Japan.
Take a look through the photo gallery above to see more of her work.
This isn’t the first time she’s beaten a global record, either. Chaptini is also the title-holder for the tallest plastic bottle sculpture, which measured 28.1 metres high. She did this in the municipality of Chekka at the end of 2019, using more than 100,000 bottles in the process.
The bid to make this new mosaic all started thre e months ago, when she called on her social-media followers to pass on any spare bottle caps they might have. She started to receive them in the thousands, from both inside and outside Lebanon, turning her initiative into a regional environmental cause in the process.
In total, she collected about 400,000 caps in various shades of blue and white.
She decided to start work on her project in the public park next to her parents’ house in north Lebanon, creating a beautiful two-dimensional mosaic illustrating a crescent moon and stars.
Chaptini glued together the outline of the mosaic, to ensure it can withstand any high winds and adverse climate conditions, but, despite her best efforts, the weather still managed to demolish her work four times throughout the process. She was determined to make it work, though.
“The original plan for this project was to involve volunteers from all over the country and have it displayed in a large gathering,” she said in a statement. “But due to social distancing measures, I had to execute the project on my own in around 160 hours. Severe weather conditions forced me to restart multiple times.”
The bottle caps were then sent to a recycling company, which generated funds that were donated to Kids First Association, a cancer charity that looks after terminally ill children who don’t have the right finances to seek proper treatment.
“This is my gift for Lebanon, the environment and the kids of the Arab world,” said Chaptini.
