Csantangelo
Registered: June 2011
City/Town/Province: Fostoria
Posts: 1
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A Little School’s Big Recycling Project
Apprentice Ecologist Initiative Scholarship Essay
By Connie
I am Connie, a recent graduate of Bridges Community Academy, a K-12 charter school in Tiffin, Ohio. I am a sixteen year old female with a great interest in animals and their environment. Seeing the environment’s destruction due to trash, three years ago, I and a few other students decided to take action, starting at our school. Due to being in the basement of a residential assisted living center and with limited funds, there didn’t seem much we could do. However, this group saw a common trait between the students and the residents—we both threw away things that could be recycled.
To start, we set up bins in our cafeteria to place recyclables in, along with bins throughout the living center’s building. Every week, a group of students collected the materials and arranged to have them transported to a larger recycling facility in town after sorting and proper configuration. This worked, but we didn’t get the turnout we wanted. After a year, we realized that some of the residents had trouble moving to the bins. Instead, we asked them to leave their recycling outside their apartment door where we could pick them up.
In 2011, due to the impending graduation of several members, we taught the middle school members how to do these tasks. We deposited the paper scraps into the proper transportation bins from each classroom, sorted the cans, and took the recycling from each resident’s door. We have made our environment better and the resident’s lives easier.
It is important to take care of our immediate environment because it makes it more comfortable to live in. Recycling does the job of simply throwing away items with the bonus of them being reused. Adding in the assistance of going door-to-door with the more physically-challenged elderly made their lives easier as well as bringing pleasure to see members of the kind younger generation. My community is benefited due to the inter-generational interaction and the reuse of materials so more would not be mined from the environment. This prevents more animal homes from being destroyed and limits the addition of more pollution to the atmosphere.
This ‘little’ recycling project has helped enrich my life by involving me into the community above my head, allowing me to build connections with other people. As for the environmental aspect, it is excellent to know that I directly assisted waste prevention and made a visible impact on my community. This project has encouraged me to start a new recycling project at my college next fall, or improve it if there is already one.
An entire community was changed by the actions of a small group of students. Inter-generational gaps were bridged. Air stayed cleaner. Our building became cleaner. Overall, Bridges Community Academy’s little recycling project sparked great changes in our school and the residential facility above it.
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