Vision

We were hoping to reduce waste going into the landfills this year at our school. That was our goal. We continued our composting program because of this, but thought it would be a good idea to look into ways to recycle more inorganic waste. This lead us to companies like TerraCycle that recycles almost everything.

Action

At our school, we have always struggled with recycling effectively. During the Youth Forum, we learned about a recycling company called TerraCycle. They recycle just about everything, but there is a fee to process. With our grant money, we purchased two prepaid shipping boxes from TerraCycle for approximately $125 each. We have noticed that our school has an abundance of snack wrappers from students and coffee pods from the teachers. We thought that these would be a good place to start for our recycling project. We placed small boxes in every classroom for students to collect snack wrappers, as well as the main box in a central location.The coffee pod box was placed in the office kitchen, next to the coffee machine. This project also inspired us to start recycling our markers, batteries and pop tabs. In Winnipeg, we have places where we can recycle those items for free already.

Reflection & Celebration

One of the major challenges we faced when doing this campaign was with our custodial team. Because there are different custodians working overnight at the school, despite our best efforts, messages did not always get passed properly to them. When we first placed the coffee pod recycling box in the staff kitchen, the custodian threw it away that evening, thinking it was recycling. Thankfully, the dumpster had not been emptied yet, so we were able to dig it out of there and keep using it. Several months later, after collecting quite a lot of coffee pods and snack wrappers, I came to work in the morning to discover that the boxes had been emptied into the garbage. It was difficult to get the message across that the bins would be filled and then shipped away for recycling. We have found this to be a barrier to many of our school-based climate initiatives, including our compost program and previous recycling attempts as well. Communication and understanding are a crucial part of our efforts.

This was a huge celebration, even despite the obstacles, because as mentioned before, our school has struggled with regular recycling. Any new sustainability projects that we run is a step in the right direction and brings us towards being a more sustainable school!