Ranney’s Lower School kicked off Earth Day last week with a new recycling project that focuses on electronics. In collaboration with Terracycle, which provides free waste-collection programs for hard-to-recycle materials, students and their families are collecting unwanted or no longer useable iPads, iPods, cameras, calculators and more through the end of the school year. For each item collected, Terracycle rewards the school with points that can be redeemed for a monetary donation to a charity or nonprofit organization. The children will vote on where the funds will go. “One option may be to use the funds to create new recycling programs here at the school,” said Judith Salisbury, Lower School Science Teacher. Renata Bodner (Ethan ’25) of Eatontown, came up with the idea for the project when she stumbled across the Terracycle website online. “We all try to do our part by leaving our recyclables at the curb, or even bringing them to a recycling center or other drop-off sites, but [Terracycle] allows us to go a step further and recycle items that a town may not take,” she says. “And even better, everybody involved in it wins.” Many items can be recycled, so why focus on electronics? “A lot of people don’t think about recycling their electronics, but they are actually quite useful,” explained Salisbury. Electronics are also worth more points from Terracycle compared with bottle caps and juice pouches, for example, and cleaner to store on campus. Local families can support the project by sending in their recyclable electronics until the end of the school year.