When most people see a plastic tub filled with old disposable spoons, yogurt containers, milk jugs and bottle caps, they see garbage. Catherine Tripp sees art supplies.

The Farmville Central High School art teacher brings in mounds of materials like this to class. Students create projects from film canisters, shoe boxes, scrap lumber, used light bulbs and even broken pencil sharpeners.

The reason she reuses? Limited resources. And that doesn't just mean in terms of her school budget. Tripp wants students to make the most of limited resources in the environment as well.

"They need to learn how to recycle," she said. "They need to be able to use their creativity."

Some of her students' conservation creations will be among the entries in this weekend's Eastern Carolina Unnatural Resources Fair, being held at the Greenville Convention Center. The fair, which features a dozen categories for children and adults, is now in its 15th year.

Tripp, who previously worked as an art teacher at both Falkland and Farmville Central, has been entering her students' work for a decade.

"The first year I actually went, I took five carloads," she said. "I had to take the seats out of my van. I took 137 pieces between my two schools."

Unnatural Resources Fair founder Jacqueline G. Ponder said art is one of the most popular categories for the fair, which also includes subject areas such as music, math, science, language arts and social studies.

"I'm always amazed at what the art departments come up with," Ponder said.

But it was science, not art, that inspired the first Unnatural Resources Fair. At that time, Ponder was a volunteer PTA science coordinator at Elmhurst Elementary School.

"They gave me $800 to see what I could buy for the science department for 530 students," she recalled. "When $800 was gone, my husband and I started making things out of recycled materials."

Their inventions gave Ponder an idea: Why not host a fair and let students see what they could create out of recycled materials? That first event brought 125 entries.

The fair now draws hundreds of entries from kindergartners to senior citizens. Ponder has included some of her all-time favorites in a collection she uses to promote the fair. They include: jewelry made from telephone wire, a hammock made from six-pack rings, wind chimes made of soup-can lids and a dinosaur made of bread ties.

Tripp said she prefers giving students reusable materials to work with, rather than simply offering pencils and paper. She believes recycling material for art is a greater challenge for students.

"Critical thinking is what we teach," Tripp said. "I give them a problem: How can we reuse some of this? This is trash; this is stuff that's normally thrown out, and we need to make use of this."

Her students have used the throwaways to create award-winning art. One of her former students placed in a congressional art show with a foil piece, and Tripp took home a blue ribbon from the Pitt County Fair with a collage inspired by a pair of broken eyeglasses frames she found in a parking lot. A student won a ribbon at last year's fair for a beach scene he created using broken stained glass and an old breakfast tray.

"Art teachers always have been able to creatively reuse things," Ponder said. "What we're trying to do is get all the rest of the disciplines creatively using what we have."

Fanette Hines Entzminger, who chairs the science department at Farmville Central, has been challenging her students to enter the Unnatural Resources Fair for the last five years. In addition to encouraging Science Club members to enter, she requires her students to create cell models from cereal boxes and other materials and sends the top entries to the fair.

Freshman Jasmin Edmondson used a broken wiffle ball as a model for a cell nucleus. Sophomore Mary Catherine Trull created her cell model using a Styrofoam ball inside an old Rice Krispies box.

"They've done art projects, exercise equipment. It's amazing how creative they are," Entzminger said. "You can always find new uses for old things."

"I've seen them use Christmas ornaments. Anything goes, jewelry, old pop bottles. It's a good selection of things."

One of her all-time favorite projects, a found mannequin that a student used to display a model of a brain, still sits in one corner of her classroom.

"I cannot throw that thing away," Entzminger said.

WHAT: The 15th annual Eastern Carolina Unnatural Resources Fair

WHEN: 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and 1-4 p.m. Sunday.

WHERE: Greenville Convention Center, 303 S.W. Greenville Blvd.

COST: Free

INFO: E-mail Jacqueline G. Ponder at jponder@unnaturalresources.org.

Contact Kim Grizzard at kgrizzard@coxnc.com.