Ferris Elementary / Richmond School District wins the $500 prize
Earth week school tours came to an end on April 23, 2010. Two tours a day for five days, does not really sound like much, I was exhausted! I have to say keeping 25 + kids and their supervisors interested and engaged in a recycling facility tour is a challenge. Some of the kids get it in an instant and ask outstanding, engaged and interesting questions. Others, well, you just have to keep working the stories and the angles to interest them and to get them excited about waste diversion and recycling.
We added a new dimension to this years tours, we asked all participaing schools to submit “the top 5 things that they as a class, and that they as individuals could do to reduce waste”. Ferris Elementary of the Richmond School District won, their submission was amazing! In my view several of their suggestions should be considered best practices to other schools. There suggestions were as follows:
- Reduce what be bring into the school, bring reuseable containers, utencils, water bottle, thermos containers
(We also encouraged hot lunch provider to use recycleable containers- which took place this year) - Performed garbage audits to determine what waste comes into the school and develop a plan to try to address it
(We classified and weighed the garbage to determine the composition and amount and have comparedf it to previous years) - Presented our garbage audit findings to the school and have encouraged them to continue to reduce their garbage (via assemeblies, announcements and made class presentations)
- Reverse lunch = kids play first and then go out to play = less garbage
- We encouraged Ikea to donate containers that allow the paper towel to dry before they are placed into the paper recycling. Each class received a metal basket and we were able to take the wet paper towel and dry it overnight so that it could be recycled in the paper recycling
Great ideas and a great example to us all!
Thank you to all the school classes that participated. Your energy and questions are invigorating for me, and most importantly they challenge my thinking. I enjoyed and learned something from each tour and consider it a priviledge to have shared my passion for waste diversion with you!
Thank you to all.
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