Since starting to upcycle Capri Sun packs four years ago, Vicki Dabrowka estimates that her Eagle Cove School third graders have saved more than 25,000 of the empty juice packages from entering landfills.
Sitting on the floor of her classroom at Eagle Cove School, surrounded by third graders, Vicki Dabrowka doesn’t look like the green warrior she is. Her campaign begins with deceptively small steps.
Every Friday, her third graders collect empty Capri Sun packages from the other classrooms in the elementary school, clean them and prepare them for mailing to TerraCycle. The juice boxes return to useful life as backpacks and pencil cases.
Upcycling is the lesson Dabrowka’s students learn from their routine, plus math as they chart each week’s collection.
Dabrowka’s classroom radiates with environmental awareness.
“We try to use natural light as much as possible, so the students chart the days that we don’t use lights,” she says. “By the end of the year, we have an analysis of how much electricity we have saved over an entire year. The kids don’t realize they’re also learning math while we’re working on these graphs.”
