June | 2024 | We Future Cycle

We Future Cycle has brought recycling stations to many many schools. The basic idea is that most of the materials that the kids touch during lunch are not trash if they were just put into the correct bin.

Sorting their lunch waste into Compost, Recycling and Trash reduces garbage by a whopping 95% simply through diversion of the materials into reusable streams.

60% of the lunchroom waste is compostable, a combination of compostable trays and food scraps. 25% is excess liquid, 10% is recycling with materials generating revenue for Westchester County and only 5% is non-compostable, non recyclable materials that are then treated as trash and incinerated into our air.

Teaching students to sort is not that difficult, the key is consistency and adult support and buy-in. And the true sign of success is when you see students carefully sort their materials and then carefully set their trays in a neat pile.

That is LIVING the details to be green. Way to go!

When you ask kids about what we breathe , the words “Air” and ” Oxygen” are most often fully interchangeable. And they will know that trees give us “air” and from 2nd grade on, they have heard the word air pollution, but without actually filling it with any meaning. For them, air is all around us, it’s a constant. Air means oxygen to them, so the concept that the CONTENT of air, the ratio of the gases that are part of air are important is beyond their (and -lets face it- most adults) imagination.

For the intrepid reader: our air consists of 78% Nitrogen, 21% and 1% of other gases including CO2 and Argon.

Every time we breathe or burn something we are converting Oxygen into Carbon Dioxide. Thanks to plant respiration, any green leafed plant will convert Carbon Dioxide back into Oxygen. So the question is how much CO2 do we produce, while cutting down trees until that balance is off?

This is all very hard to grasp for kids but teaching them about it and then showing them how a small chemical reaction of mixing vinegar and baking soda together creates an entire balloon full of Carbon Dioxide and for them to watch that it takes only a tiny puff of CO2 from that balloon to snuff out a candle, was very eye opening to them.

Air pollution is something we ALL are contributing to …….. everyday (!), but we all can do plenty of little things to mitigate the results. These kids are going to be part of the generation of kids who care.