The Frank K. Hehnly Elementary School Recycling Crusaders consist of 35 fifth grade students. The Crusader advisors are second grade teacher, AnnMarie Estevez, and computer teacher, Diane Rizzo. The students encourage the entire school to use the recycling bins outside of the classrooms. They meet twice a week to go through the bins to clean, box up, and mail various items for recycling: drink pouches, recycled cell phones and ink cartridges are sent to Terracycle; bottle caps are sent to Aveda; soda tabs are sent to the Ronald McDonald House. The students also have a recycling question of the week. The whole school is involved and has a chance to answer the question. On Friday three students are picked and win a prize. The fifth graders have enjoyed working all year with the recycling program and making a difference in taking care of the Earth.  

At Humke Elementary School, there are several such volunteers, and Patti Ebbe is just one of them. Ebbe is president of the school’s Humke Involved Parent Organization, or HIPO, and she also helps out with day-to-day operations. “We raise money to help with monetary and other needs that the teachers or students may need,” Ebbe said. “At the beginning of last school year, we were able to purchase oscillating stand fans for all the classrooms. We purchased four iPads with accessories for the teachers to use in the classroom. We were able to pay for some of the reading materials that were used, just to name a few things.” “Last year we collected 13,333 juice pouches for a company called TerraCycle,” Ebbe said. “You don’t have to wash them out or even take out the straws. You just collect them, send them in using their free shipping, redeem your points and they send you a check. Our ‘Drink Pouch Brigade’ earned Humke Elementary $399.99, or three cents apiece — for basically garbage! We are getting paid to collect garbage that would have gone into a landfill. And the juice pouches are being recycled into new products.” “It doesn’t take a lot of time!” she said. “You don’t have to come to every meeting. Maybe you just come to the classroom to say ‘hello.’ You can spend 15 to 20 minutes at an event and make a difference. It’s important because kids like to see their parents get involved … especially at the elementary school age. They like to show off their parents and grandparents.”

 

 

Desde el colegio fomentamos el cuidado del Medio ambiente y colaboramos con varias empresas dedicadas a ello. Una de estas empresas es TERRACYCLE, que recoge instrumentos de escritura y los convierte en nuevos productos o materiales.

Puedes participar desde el cole, el trabajo o desde casa. Mira el bolígrafo que tienes más a mano: ¿sabes que lo puedes transformar en una mochila? Bolígrafos, rotuladores, marcadores, portaminas y hasta borradores de tinta no se pueden llevar al contenedor amarillo, puesto que no son envases, y terminan en nuestras basuras, mezclados con otros residuos, echados a perder.

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The owner of the Spartan Grill considers his cleanup effort a failure but says he is working on a solution. Mike Roylos, owner of the Spartan Grill, financed a two-day butt pickup earlier this month, offering 5 cents a butt during a two-day social experiment. He came up with the No Butts Now! campaign after months of frustration over the proliferation of butts in downtown Portland despite a ban on smoking in public parks and within 20 feet of doorways and a $100 fine for tossing butts on the street. About 30 young people participated, collecting 26,000 butts on May 1 and 2. Roylos said even though he could only pay for $320 worth of butts, participants didn't complain. "They were cool and said they wanted to do it again," said Roylos. Within days of the pickup, Monument Square was once again littered with butts. Roylos said while his one-man crusade raised awareness about the butt problem to some extent, he considers his social experiment a failure. Roylos said any permanent solution to the butt problem will require stopping a never-ending cycle. "We have put a lot of thought in trying to figure out a better way," said Roylos. Meanwhile, Roylos is doing research on the 26,000 butts that were collected, enough to fill an 18-square-inch box, before sending them off to TerraCycle, a Trenton, N.J., company that converts butts into plastic pellets. He won't reveal the nature of the research because it is part of his new idea for ridding public places of cigarette butts. "It is going to be pretty neat. This little town is going to be on the forefront of something," said Roylos.

While convenient, the single-use coffee pods are exactly easily recycled. As America's culture of convenience continues to flourish, single-cup coffee makers have become increasingly popular among coffee drinkers. But beneath those expedient one-cup coffee pods lies a growing environmental problem. "These things aren't readily recyclable, if recyclable at all," said Darby Hoover, senior resources specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Anytime you've got this kind of small, single-use packaging option, especially when there are clearly alternatives, it just leads me to question why you would promote that system over another that works just as well for many applications." Approximately 13% of the U.S. adult population drinks a coffee made in a single-cup brewer every day, according to a 2013 study from the National Coffee Association. That's up from only 4% in 2010, said Joe DeRupo, director of communications for the NCA. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc., which acquired Keurig in 2006 and has since become the largest manufacturer of single-use coffee brewers in the country, has been struggling with the recyclability of Keurig's K-Cups from the beginning. Like most single-cup coffee pods, K-Cups consist of a combination of plastic, aluminum, organic material (coffee grounds) and a paper filter. While all said items can be easily recycled separately, the K-Cup as a whole cannot be recycled on a municipal level. "It's that hybrid packaging that makes it very hard for traditional recycling companies," said Albe Zakes, global vice president of public relations at the recycling company TerraCycle. "If you think of something as simple as a chip bag for example, a chip bag is fully recyclable. The challenge is that it's both plastic and aluminum, a hybrid packaging, which is very common, especially in food and beverage." Since 2009, TerraCycle has partnered with various single-serve coffee manufacturers to provide recycling solutions for spent coffee pods. By teaming up with Tassimo, Mars Drinks, Nespresso and more recently Illy, TerraCycle has developed a customized take back program for each company that has helped divert millions of coffee pods from landfills across the country. "Over the last couple years, TerraCycle has already collected I believe 25 million coffee capsules of the various applications through all these programs," said Zakes. "As we expand with more companies, bringing Illy into the fold, we've really ended up in a place where we work with basically everyone except for the K-Cup." Despite reaching out to the company multiple times, TerraCycle has not been able to develop a relationship with Green Mountain, Zakes said. Green Mountain is experimenting with various materials for a new, recyclable K-Cup, though nothing is in production yet. "I know and I appreciate that Green Mountain has been trying to wrestle with ways to make its pods more environmentally sustainable pretty much the whole time that they've been offering them," said Hoover, the senior resources specialist for the NRDC. "But incinerating them instead of recycling them doesn't reduce the need to rely on virgin source materials to make oodles more of these disposable pods." The question remains whether the convenience of single-serve coffee systems is worth the overall environmental impact.

One of the noteworthy guest speakers at the HSM partner conference was Tom Szaky, CEO of US-based recycling firm TerraCycle, who presented his firm’s concept and achievements to the audience. HSM is working with TerraCycle on a waste collection programme that involves HSM’s crushing and baling machines. TerraCycle has become quite well-known in the office supplies space after a number of initiatives with major manufacturers and resellers over the last few years. Szaky told OPI that a new, international project with Office Depot was in the pipeline and pointed to the world’s first pen made from recycled pens, introduced by Sanford this year. HSM’s Managing Director Irene Dengler said that the conference had helped HSM receive “valuable and constructive feedback” from its reseller partners. “There was no particular highlight for me,” she told OPI, “as there was a very positive atmosphere during the entire conference. Such a successful event is due, not only to the agenda, but also to the delegates, and we were lucky to have great participants.”