Integrate School Papers Recycling System

box plus wrapper.JPG

Vital Stats

Catherine L

Rowland Heights, CA

  • People Doing It40

The Problem

I'm trying to make our school's paper recycling program an integrate system. Also, I want to see if we can recycle our lunch boxes. We can save more trees by getting all the classrooms and everyone participating.

Plan of Action

We already have a recycling club, so I contacted the president and handed out surveys for recycling groups. Since some rooms don’t have a recycling bin, I went to Costco for free cardboard boxes. My friends and I cut out extra parts to cover gaps, add handles, and tape labels on to motivating people to recycle. So far, 6 boxes are delivered to the rooms that don’t have a bin. Over 3 weeks, 1,649 pounds of papers are recycled, but I can’t determine the affect of 6 bins yet. At Friday lunch(club’s recyling time), there are still a lot of rooms are locked. After 3 weeks, I found out its just because the bins are not full every weeks or because sometimes certain group of the club couldn’t come to collect them. Therefore, I’m doing a calendar for recycling days of different classrooms, so volunteers don’t need to carry the recycling cans all the way to the building and see many of of the rooms locked.

Project Updates

update on http://greenrhs.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/may-3rd/

An email was sent from Newark Recycled Fibers(Newark is where the material of our school's lunch boxes come from). I'm trying to get the information they wanted. However, is there any better way we can recycle lunch boxes? Since we're probably not able to do seed fundraising and I wished to sell the green buttons starting next year for the ongoing project(so people won't lose buttons through our the summer), we still need to find out if we can buy the smaller bins (maybe being attached to trashcans?)