Leann
Registered: December 2009
City/Town/Province: Cedar Falls
Posts: 1
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My name is Leann Luecke. I am a senior at Columbus Catholic High School in Waterloo, Iowa. Next year I wish to major in environmental science. I have a passion for taking care of the Earth and doing all that I can to reduce the negative impact we have on it. I think it is very important to track how much humans impact the Earth so we don’t harm the many living things here on Earth, including ourselves. This is the main reason I want to study and have a career where I can look out for the Earth. I hope to make a positive impact on the Earth through my lifework.
For as long as I have been at Columbus, there has never been recycling. I thought this was very strange since our society is “going green.” Some teachers had a recycling bin in their rooms, but that was their own efforts. In grade school we had recycling in all of the classrooms and I asked myself why we didn’t have it at high school too? I didn’t come up with a good answer, for obvious reasons. I then decided I could get a recycling program going at Columbus. I was not sure what this would entail, but I knew I would have to start with doing some research and talking to my principal.
My high school is a small parochial school with about 300 kids total. There are two floors and a basement, all of which have classrooms. I knew I needed to somehow get bins in every classroom for the paper to be collected in. I knew there also needed to be a way to collect the paper once the bins got full and we needed to do something with all the collected paper.
To start, I called my principal to make sure I could do some research and that the project could potentially happen. I didn’t want to do all of the research and find out that he wouldn’t allow me to do this for the school. He approved it with no hesitation, and I began my investigating. I asked my parents and looked in the phone book for places that took recycled paper. I found a company called City Carton. After many phone calls, they informed me that they would pick up our paper at no charge to the school. It sounded like a great plan; all I needed to do was have a meeting with the principal, the representative from City Carton, and myself.
We all met, talked things over, and decided that the principal and I needed to talk about a few things before we said it was a go. The principal and I talked about the various options and some that he had in mind. We ended up going with a plan that would actually gain money for the school. It would require a semi-truck being parked in the parking lot. It would be filled with paper and old text books. When the semi-truck was full, the company would exchange it with an empty one and pay the school for the paper.
My next duty was informing the teachers about the project and what they would need to do. I talked to all of the teachers at one of their summer meetings, and I also found out how many of them would need boxes for their classrooms. After rounding up about twenty boxes and making recycling signs for them, I delivered them to the various classrooms and they began to fill up. When these boxes are full, they get dumped in the semi-truck. It is a very simple plan that seems to work very well.
When I asked my principal to reflect back on the process and how he thinks it is going, he said "Recycling paper is a great way for us to help the environment and to become more aware of how much paper we actually use. We have struggled a little with getting things to the trailer to recycle and sometimes people do require more education about what can and can not be recycled. Overall,
it has been a very worthwhile project." I hope this project will continue next year and will be a success. I think it is very important to have a recycling program in schools so students can get in the habit of recycling and have it become a way of life .
This project has benefited the community in the fact that all of the paper that my school goes through is now recycled, which like any school is a lot of paper. Instead of going to the landfill, it is now broken down and used again. This saves many trees, in fact, every ton of paper recycled saves about seventeen trees. When we don’t cut down these trees, we save the habitats of the animals that live there and the opportunity still exists for the trees to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen for us to breath. Recycling has endless benefits from reducing waste, to reducing our impact on the Earth, and even creating jobs for those who work at recycling centers. Although it requires a little change of habit to now throw paper in a recycling bin instead of a trash can, the benefit to the environment well exceed the little changes.
I feel like this project was very important to take on and complete because we should be recycling everywhere. I don’t think there is a question whether to recycle or not. I think we should always be thinking about this and looking for ways to help Mother Earth. I feel like we were put on this Earth not to live how we please and do what we want to the Earth, but to take care of it and make sure we don’t do it any harm. The Earth is a beautiful place and we need to preserve it for future generations, so they can see and appreciate all the Earth has to show and offer. I read a quote once that said, “We do not inherite the Earth from our parents; we borrow it from our children.” This points out how our actions on the Earth will be felt by our children, who deserve to experience the Earth’s wonders and beauty.
Recycling, to me, is very important and should be done everywhere. By doing this project I have learned about myself, my community, and how to go about starting something in my community. It was a good experience that I can take a lot from. I had to work with people that I usually don’t work with, such as people in authority and business people. I learned about leadership and taking the initiative. I took something I was passionate about and used it to benefit my community.
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