Fall 2004
When will the 3 r's of education be... Reduce, Reuse, Recycle?
by Alyssa Mathews
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Blaine Primary School teacher Robb McKay started a recycling program for his school. His second-graders collect, sort and dump paper from every classroom. |
As the last yellow school bus pulls onto the street, children linger on the sidewalks and teachers begin to pack their bags. Behind the school, the playground is silent, and off to the side sits a familiar sight. A waste receptacle waits with its contents bulging. A peek inside reveals the week’s spelling tests, cardboard boxes from the school’s new computers, half-eaten lunches and glass juice containers from an afternoon staff meeting.
Public schools do not prioritize trash-reduction education in the curriculum. Independently funded private schools, however, have flexibility and money to integrate this concept into their classes.
The Blaine School District has six 2-cubic-yard trash bins that hold up to 300 pounds. Each trash bin is emptied five times per week. According to the Blaine School District Waste Evaluation of 2001-2002, all school trash bins were near capacity every day. In one week, Blaine schools’ 2,466 students and employees could produce as much as 9,000 pounds of trash, or 3.6 pounds of trash per person.
The average person at Blaine School District produces more than three times the trash of the average person at Whatcom Hills Waldorf School, a private kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school. Waldorf has one 1.5-cubic-yard trash bin that can hold up to 200 pounds. This trash bin is generally filled to capacity only when the school has an event or celebration, and it is emptied once each week. With a school population of 187, each person at Waldorf could produce roughly 1.1 pounds of trash per week, provided the trash bin is full.
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Ben Phillips is a student at Waldorf who wants to make a documentary about recycling as a final project before graduating from eighth grade. |
Fourth-grade teacher Dawn Christiana said Blaine Elementary School recycles only paper and cardboard. This poses a problem when students bring cans and bottles in their lunches.
“We kind of contradict ourselves because we say, ‘Let’s recycle,’ but we don’t recycle cans or glass because we’re not set up for that,” Christiana said. “I’m guessing that the reason why is because of cost. As a district, we don’t have a place to put them. If it is recycled in our classroom, then I can take it home and put it in my own recycling, which would be one classroom alternative, but not a school or districtwide plan.”
Deb Cummings, the principal of Blaine Elementary School, said it would take someone really passionate about recycling for the school to start a program. Cummings said she would support a recycling program if someone were willing to implement it.
At the classroom level, trash-reduction programs depend on the teacher’s involvement. Carol Gallaher, a Blaine fifth-grade teacher, said she finds it difficult to teach trash reduction, but she
still makes a point to bring recycling awareness to her students. Even with the time constraints of state education requirements, Gallaher’s students are learning how to reduce trash and the importance of recycling.
Dennis Gault, a student in Gallaher’s class, said he and his classmates reuse newspaper to cover their desks during science projects, and when finished, they recycle the newspapers instead of throwing them away.
In an effort to reduce food waste and increase class productivity, Blaine
Elementary serves lunch after recess instead of before. A study in the August Journal of the American Dietetic Association found food waste in schools dropped by 13 percent when elementary children had recess before lunch. Blaine counselor Chris Owings said children traditionally have morning work time, then lunch and finally recess. The premise from a food standpoint is that students waste less when they consume more.
Robb McKay, a second-grade teacher at Blaine Primary School, became a proponent of recycling, not only in his classroom, but also in the entire school. McKay’s class is responsible
for collecting and recycling the school’s paper and cardboard.
Students can choose to give up their recess time to become classroom recyclers. Second-grader Orion Matson said he enjoys being a part of the recycling program.
“We go to people’s classrooms with that blue barrel and get their recycling and dump it in. Then we need to go out the door beside the gym, and then — you see that brick wall? You go behind it, and then there’s some recycling places where you put recycling,” Matson said.
McKay said he started his classroom recycling program three years ago when he realized how much paper and cardboard the school was wasting. Other teachers just didn’t have the time to deal with the added stress of recycling. McKay said he takes on the challenge in an effort to educate students, give them responsibility and boost their self-esteem.
In comparison to public schools, private schools have the freedom to incorporate trash
conservation throughout a child’s education.
Waldorf is one private school that has been successful in trash reduction education through its curriculum. Waldorf is a federally recognized, state-approved, nonprofit educational institution.
Its curriculum is based on a hands-on, holistic approach. With its philosophy of education comes its fundamental principle that all a child has — food, housing, clothing — is connected to the earth.
Waldorf asks its students to bring lunches from home in reusable containers and use minimal packaging. Paper use is limited in the classrooms. The Waldorf approach emphasizes direct interaction between students and teachers, with little reliance on paper handouts. Lower grades use slate boards and chalk instead of paper. The third-grade curriculum at Waldorf includes farming and gardening, which teaches children to reduce and reuse. Speaking about the younger children,
Waldorf administrator Joseph Doucette said: “I think that they intuitively understand it when they’re younger. … So that’s one of the reasons why we try to keep that alive in the students because they are connected to the earth more naturally when they are younger, but they’re not aware of it. And as you get older and forget it, that consciousness, that dreaminess kind of disappears, and you become less connected to the earth and more interested in products, and you forget about waste.”
Eighth-grader Ben Phillips has attended Waldorf since preschool. He is required to complete a final project at Waldorf before graduating from the eighth grade.
“I have decided that mine is going to be a documentary about recycling,”
Phillips said. He said he wants to know what happens to the recycling once it leaves the curb.
He also wants to know why some in the community don’t recycle.
The differences between public and private schools’ trash-reduction methods may not strictly be a product of trash awareness.
During the 2001-2002 school year, RE Sources, a nonprofit environmental education agency, and the Whatcom County Solid Waste Division evaluated Blaine School
District’s garbage and recycling system, hoping to find simple changes to decrease trash production. According to the Blaine School District Waste Evaluation, the operations and teaching staff supported an increase in recycling, but no one had the extra time to devote to it. RE Sources recom-
mended four easy recycling fixes: switching one of the four mixed paper toters at the elementary school to newspaper, switching to a 3-yard trash bin at the middle school, canceling one of the paper toters at the primary school and changing to once-a-week collection for all trash bins during the summer months. These changes would have yielded an estimated savings of $5,684.22 per year.
Mary Lynne Derrington, Blaine School District superintendent, said she was not familiar with the study, which predates her July 1, 2003 hire. Jim Kenoyer, the Blaine School District director of facilities, said he never received a copy of the Blaine School District Waste
Evaluation. Kenoyer said, however, that the elementary school has cut back the amount of newspapers it receives, so it doesn’t need another newspaper toter. The middle school now has a 3-yard trash bin. The primary school has eight additional classrooms, which now use the extra mixed-paper toters, and during the summer months, three of the district’s trash bins are removed and trash is only picked up two times a week.
Crina Hoyer, RE Sources’ education director, said several factors led to why the only waste-reduction changes Blaine School District implemented were those that didn’t involve teachers’ time. A teacher’s first goal is education, and Hoyer said much of that education is preparing for tests.
“What we found was that there was a lot of really good energy around recycling, but they’re battling so many different external forces that it almost becomes overwhelming in the light of trying to teach,” Hoyer said. “Test-driven education is putting a roadblock up for a lot of different things: extracurricular (activities), trash reduction, recycling. It is just one more thing that is really dictating education.”