Vision

The Waterloo Region District School Board does not have a centralized recycling program in our schools. Any school that has a recycling program is run by a teacher and students of that school. This is what my Environment Club chose to focus on – using our funds to develop a recycling program that educates students on how to properly recycle and implemented easily enough that it could be sustainable from one year to the next.

Action

For the education piece, we noticed that students have no idea what items can actually be recycled just from basic conversations around the school. When the program is implemented in Fall 2025, it’s going to start with an educational slideshow and video that the students are making to inform everyone in the school about what can go in the blue bins (for plastic and glass), and grey bins (paper). In each classroom, we are going to have disposal stations, including a garbage can (which we already have), a blue bin (which we have), and grey bins (which we purchased). Each bin will be labelled properly with ‘garbage,’ ‘paper,’ and ‘plastic.’ Above each bin, we are also going to have our laminated, colour posters showing what goes into each bin.

Additionally, we worked with the construction technology class to built a multi-disposal unit, that has spots for garbage, plastic and glass recycling, and paper recycling to go into our cafeteria. We painted it in our school colours, have labels on it for what goes where, and are placing more laminated posters on the front and top of the bin to make it as visual as possible.

We are working with the Region to get set up for pick up on the east side of the school starting the first week of September. This has been a bit of a difficult situation since the region was on strike while we were trying to get this project started, so that delayed things a little bit. We are getting 3 blue bins on wheels and 3 grey bins on wheels from them to help with facilitating a centralized weekly collection. We will have three collection ‘hubs’ throughout the school, where classrooms will bring their classroom recycling and double check that it is appropriately sorted into the correct collection bins. Either the Environment Club and/or the Grade 9 Fast Forward Geography classes will take care of the collection each week, with myself facilitating the collections. The only thing that custodial will do is take the bins out to the curbs on a weekly basis.

This project relates directly to sustainability because knowing how to properly recycle and actually doing it is a fundamental step towards students being more aware of what they use, how they use it, and how to properly dispose of it. Hopefully, we won’t end up with as much garbage within the school as right now all items, recyclable or not, wind up in the garbage. This knowledge and these skills students will carry with them all throughout their lives, including immediately at school and home.

Reflection & Celebration

We still have a ways to go to implementation. We need to finish labelling our multi-disposal unit and adding our laminated posters for how to organize, distribute all of the paper recycling bins to the classrooms, and put up our disposal posters in each classroom. We are also creating an educational slideshow for homerooms to go over how to properly recycle, how to tell if something is recyclable, and the positive impacts of properly recycling on our communities and environment. Full implementation is going to take place at the beginning of the 2025/2026 school year. We’re really excited to see how this is going to turn out!