ZEBULON - When Charlotte artist David Edgar came to Zebulon Middle School to share his breakthrough art with local students he was impressed with the prep work that preceded his visit.

Edgar has a unique art form. He gives used, plastic laundry detergent bottles new life by creating fish-themed panel collage work.

The form of art landed in Edgar’s lap when the New England Patriots defeated the Carolina Panthers in the XXXVIII Super Bowl in 2004. Edgar went to a Super Bowl party but, new to the area, he had no Panther attire to sport.

“I had no Panthers stuff and about an hour before the game I made a Panthers mask out of a light blue detergent bottle and it started from there,” Edgar said.

Nowadays Edgar is among the United Arts Council of Wake County’s pool of professional artists area teachers use to spice things up in the art room. Thanks to funding from the UAC and Zebulon Middle School PTA, Edgar spent three days sharing his media with Zebulon students last week. His art form, he says, has value beyond the desire to express oneself.

“It really resonates with them in a couple of ways,” Edgar said of the ZMS art department and other Wake County schools he plans to visit. “One, it was free art supplies, stretching their budgets. Two, there’s an awful lot of secondary content they can teach about the environment, about plastic and recycling — all sorts of things relevant to today’s education.”

Edgar initially thought he wanted to protect his media as intellectual property but realized that wasn’t very practical and took a reverse mindset. He decided he wanted to go down as the pioneer of plastics in the recyclable arts field.

“My wife and I did a book through Lark Books called Fantastic Recycled Plastic,” he said. “I wanted to introduce post-consumer recyclable plastics, and the main stream accepted a contemporary craft form. I started workshops before getting into the schools and found lots and lots of teachers attended.”

Zebulon Middle School art teacher Lisa Peszko was one of those teachers. She was immediately interested in Edgar’s work.

“For an art exploration class the goal is for them to try a little bit of everything and see what materials and media they’d like to work with,” Peszko said. “They’d never get to do this if not for this situation. Now exposed to this, they may want to do sculptures or may want to work with plastics. We started out showing them the pile of pollution in the Pacific Ocean that’s as big as Texas. They got all that with it in the beginning.”

Sixth grader Gabrielle Stanley-Jones said the panel fish she constructed turn out “right good.”

“It’s pretty fun, but I really like the idea of working with recycling things more,” Stanley-Jones said. “It’s pretty hard, but in a fun way. I knew recycling ended up in the ocean, but I didn’t know it ended up a lot in the ocean.”

Edgar said the Zebulon students were enthusiastic, and based on Stanley-Jones’ input they got his complimentary message. Edgar said Zebulon Middle School showed gigantic support through the volume of materials it collected in anticipation of his arrival, and he wasn’t lying. Thursday marked his last of three days at the school, and seven tubs full of detergent bottles were still stacked in the art room ready for use.

“We collected plastics for about six months,” Peszko said. “We had plenty of plastic for this and plenty now to do other projects. I want to make it a regular craft.”