Do schools in your town/city recycle on a daily basis?
When I was in school, we had plates and silverware, and they were washed and used the next day. (I'm not ancient, but yes, it's been a while.)
I've taught in a few schools and have been shocked by the amount of garbage and waste produced EVERY day - some use styrofoam type divided plates, plastic utensils (enclosed in plastic) and paper cartons (better, but it's still a lot of paper).
I'm not asking about the food (we know that's a problem), but how does your school or school system deal with 100s or 1000s of kids eating 1 or 2 meals per day (if they do breakfast) and the100s or 1000s of pounds of garbage created?
2007-05-28T19:31:26Z
Do me a favor (especially if you've answered already and see this) - tell me HOW your school/school system recycles and how large your district is. We have 90,000+ - that's a LOT of waste. Thanks!
Toy Story 3 fan2007-05-28T21:59:04Z
Favorite Answer
Great question!
Yes, my school recycles on a daily basis. Students try to place all recyclable materials in the recycle bins including paper, cans, and bottles. However, a couple weeks ago I saw the janitor put the cans and bottles in the trash because she claimed that there wasn't enough room in the recyle bins and paper took up less space.
My school uses styrofoam plates and plastic utensils to serve the hot lunches. Unfortunately, they got rid of the compost program because not enough students were using the compost pins properly. Now, we're just stuck with garbage bins and recycling bins.
We also have to develop the mindset of using recycled materials, or else recycling is just pointless. The solution to this waste is to have less packaging materials for food!!!
When i went to grade school, they set up a program where a few kids would be part of the "recycling team" it would be a big drawling with all the kids names picked at random.
Everyone got a chance to do it. During the lunch recess the recycling team would partner up with a chosen teacher and they would go around the school collecting news papers or extra printing papers and cans and such.
Each kid would get a little "prize certificate" saying they were part of the team. it was awesome and helped the school out a ton too.
No, my high school doesn't recycle. It's ridiculous. All the time, you see kids mindlessly throwing aluminum cans and plastic water bottles in the garbage. Unfortunately, they can't put a recycling bin in the cafeteria, because the kids will be lazy and throw garbage into recycling and vice versa. I wish I could start something to make the school more environment-friendly.
It is a shame that they do not recycle more. maybe we can do more about it. your question got me to thinking. I will forward your question and/or concern to our school here and I will see what I can do to get others involved. That is an excellent question. I also went and looked online to see some more info on it and found a pretty helpful site. I am printing it now so I can bring it with me. Too bad in todays time that we are not more aware of recyclying. I think recycling is a good way for the kids to raise money and maybe we should just remind them of this or something. I think it fell on the back burner somehow and we should enlighten them again with different ideas and different suggestions for recycling and incentives.
My school did paper and plastic bottles. But everything else was thrown away as far as I know. (There were 600 in my high school.) It was gross to see all the trash, but not as gross as college. I worked in my dorm's cafeteria as a freshman, and I was appalled to see the amount of waste produced there. Even though dishes and silverware were washed and resused, there were huge amounts of napkins of almost entirely untouched fruit, pieces of chicken, and half-eaten sides of vegetables on the plates, not to mention the disposables like cereal boxes and Little Debbies. It was terrible.