City High Greenpeace Club Helps Shimek Elementary School set up a Recycling Program
Infographic by Jesse Hausknecht-Brown
The Greenpeace club is partnering with Shimek Elementary School to set up a recycling program with the the elementary schoolers.
November 12, 2019
While recycling may seem routine for students at City High, many elementary schools don’t have the same recycling opportunities. City High’s chapter of Greenpeace is working with elementary schools in the district, specifically Shimek, to set up a plastic recycling program. The school has paper recycling but doesn’t yet have a way to recycle plastic.
“We just started this program at Shimek Elementary School. We just met with them about two weeks ago and had a meeting with the principal and some teachers, and we’re setting up a recycling program there,” Katherine Introna ‘20, a member of City High’s Greenpeace.
The program is starting with only teachers, with a recycling bin in the teachers’ lounge. Greenpeace’s members are hoping to expand to the students at Shimek as well.
“For now it’s just the teachers,” Introna said. “We just started figuring this out, so a lot of what we’re doing right now is figuring out what next steps we need to do to make this system advance forward.”
One of the ways Greenpeace wants to expand the program to the students is to educate them about why recycling is so important. City High students are working on ways to be able to give presentations about recycling and the environment to Shimek students.
“We’re going to start expanding, so we’re going to try to see if you can do some presentations,” Introna said. “They said they could work us during lunches to present to the students.”
Education of younger kids is important to the members of Greenpeace because it involves expanding awareness about the environmental crisis to younger generations.
“We can kind of get the kids to be early green-doers and have them start to understand what recycling is and how to do it correctly so they can be better in the future,” Introna said.
Along with expanding the recycling program to students, Greenpeace also would like to involve the homeschool center at Shimek.
“We’re supposed to be starting to pick [recycling] up from the homeschooling center there too,” Introna said. “A lot of parents of students will hang out there and possibly have a lot to recycle.”
City High students go to Shimek every other Friday, pick up the recycling, and take it to the recycling center on North Dodge Street. Students can receive Silver Cord hours for this. Another goal for the elementary schools is to have a marker recycling program.
“We are thinking of doing…marker recycling because dried-out markers can get sent back to the company and then they can recycle them,” Azzurra Sartini-Rideout ‘20, one of Greenpeace’s creators, said.
The club hopes to do a similar sort of thing at the other elementary schools.
“Kids are the future, so we want to get them started early,” Sartini-Rideout said.
