Tag Archives: zerowasteeducation

White Plains littlest ones are learning how to sort recyclables

Leave a comment

It is one of the highlights for me to go into a preschool class and teach 3y olds that their actions can make a difference. They are so eager to please, eager to learn and are so openly astonished that they have any power whatsoever.

Empowering kids to sort materials into the correct bin and showing them how that makes a difference is the beginning of a lifelong environmental awareness.

What I particularly like is showing them how their food scraps look like after they are composted. With great excitement they are touching and smelling the compost and all declare with sincerity that composting is good. They are off to a great beginning.

Being Green is in the little details

Leave a comment

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!

White Plains Ridgeway Students Are Learning to Look Deeper For The Environment

Leave a comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Students answering scavenger hunt questions at Ridgeway Elemantary School

It is unusually quiet in White Plains Ridgeway Elementary School in-door recess because rows of students are sitting in front of large posters trying to figure out the clues.

The “Did you know” lunchroom scavenger hunt program, by We Future Cycle, is challenging students to look beyond recycling. Students learn shocking statistics about the every day things they use. They learn that the US alone uses 500 million straws per day, for an average use time of less than 60 seconds. And they learn that it is easy to make a difference. Just ask yourself ” Do I really need that straw”.

Filling out blanks, unscrambling the clues brought students to ponder facts like that the world uses AND DISCARDS over a trillion plastic bags a year. Each of these plastic bags still being in existence, most ending up floating in our water ways now.

Students learned about the staggering mountains of single use plastic bottles in the US and the depressing recycling rate of only 23%.

We Future Cycle’s goal is to nurture the other two Rs , REDUCE and  REUSE in participating schools. Society cannot recycle itself to zero waste and only through education we can change our throw-away society.

Because there is no away in the world