Two months ago, Green Grens informed the school that Elk Grove is the worst in the district at recycling and expressed the urgency needed to improve recycling in our building.

Green Grens decided that the most important priority for their group is working with students, teachers and administration at EGHS in order to increase recycling in our building.

Since then, the black cans have been removed from classrooms and have been replaced with the blue recycle cans. Hope that, this replacement will get people to pay attention and use the recycle cans for recycle items only. If students use those cans to throw away their trash it will lead to cross contamination.

Once the barrel becomes so cross contaminated, that we can no longer use it for recycling, it has to go in the garbage, and that’s been our biggest problem as a school . We need to address and try to resolve.

On October 2, Steve Gordon, guidance counselor and Green Grens sponsor, and Kyle Burritt, associate principal, presented building recycling information to Joe Bush’s classes in the hopes of seeking out volunteers for publicizing the school’s recycling goals. One of the topics discussed was the possibility of collaborating with the Leadership classes in order to create videos that would be shown on the morning announcements in order to inform both students and staff about what they can do to help improve the school’s recycling. The videos would be put together and edited by Mr. Bush’s Leadership classes, and the information would be fact checked by Gordon and Burritt.

Students in the Leadership classes are also thinking about other projects that they can do both at school and at home in order to improve the community’s recycling habits.

“Where I live, there is no curbside recycling at all, so I want to go to one of the city hall meetings and petition that, and I think that will help in the long run,” senior Jordan Barth said.

The Leadership students also have ideas for how to inform students about the importance of recycling.

“I feel like it would help if we took the time during a class period to actually explain the whole blue bin and yellow bin system here,” senior Jeyline Medina said.

By helping educate students about just how serious and important recycling is not only to our school but to our community can be a start on the path to improving our recycling habits.

“We’re waiting for kids to come to us with some other suggestions,” Burritt said. “It can’t be our custodians, it can’t be me, it has to come from you guys.”

Recently, EGHS received accreditation to become Energy Star certified which means that as a school we are operating the building as efficiently as we can with natural gas, water, electricity, etc. The next step, would be to become LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified for our school building which would state that as a school we are doing everything we can to help reduce our environmental footprint.

The world can only go on so much longer before it runs out of resources. As a school, our goal should be to recycle more in order to reduce costs spent on throwing away trash so that the school can use the money on resources to help benefit students.