Saving The World, One Pop Can At A Time

"Saving the World, One Pop Can at a Time. . ." It's the motto that my kids came up with after we started our first EcoAction effort, a recycling program, and, most of the time, that feels exactly like what we're trying to do. When I first started here (actually, the week I started) I was approached by several students who wanted me to sponsor an ecology club. I agreed immediately, before I knew that our small, rural school didn't have clubs, our school didn't have an activity period when I could meet with clubs, and we weren't going to get any financial help from our financially bereft district. And yet, here we are, three years later, and our roster is almost 50 kids (in a 7-12 school of less that 400). We recycle, we raise money for ourselves, we plant trees, we educate the school and the community and we provide an after school activity for kids looking for a place to belong. The first project that our club undertook was a recycling program. Before this club formed, everything the school had went into one big dumpster in the back. Today, we do our best to recycle cans, glass, plastic and paper. We do our best. Since we can rely on no funding, the students create recycling bins from cardboard boxes for paper. We've come up with five plastic, flip-top bins for the rest. Every week, the kids gather up the paper room-to-room and sort through the rest. Everything goes into the back of my little car, and I drive it home with me, where it gets picked up with my community recycling. There's no community recycling within twenty miles of our school, so this is the way it has to be. The kids work so hard to make this happen, that often times, it's demoralizing when the cardboard boxes break apart spilling paper all through the hall, or people throw trash in the larger bins because we don't have any lids for them. Because of the difficulties, recycling takes almost an hour of our club time that could be used doing other activities. Still, my kids persevere and I'll always be proud of them for that. Teachers and students alike have suggested replacing the destroyed cardboard with hard plastic bins that are labeled for paper recycling. Unfortunately, purchasing these bins has never been in our budget. Plastic bins reduce the time necessary for recycling and lids would encourage people to use our bins for the purpose they were intended. You can help show these kids that doing something good for the environment doesn't always have to be hard. This donation would make our efforts so much less challenging and would make a world of difference to these kids who try so hard all the time. Our efforts go largely unnoticed by the student body here. By donating to this project, you can show these kids that someone else really does care about them, and their efforts to help the environment. You can help us save the world, even if it is only one pop can at a time.