With the help of their teacher Judi Eastburn, the students at Lincoln High School conducted an in-depth analysis of the impacts of recycling. The Lincoln High School Recycling team had a successful track record recycling aluminum, glass and plastic. This year, with Earth Force support, the students expanded their focus to recycling paper and motivated other students, their teachers and administrators to jump on their recycling band wagon.
In October, Ms. Eastburn joined an Earth Force networking session at theBlue Mountain Recycling Center, along with Earth Force teachers and students from eight other schools. There everyone learned about single stream recycling - a method where paper, plastic, aluminum and other materials are thrown into one bin and do not require separating before collection - making it more convenient to recycle. Approaching the issue from a policies an practices perspective, the Lincoln students used Blue Mountain’s expertise and their own research to create a convincing presentation to the School District of Philadelphia, explaining why all of Philadelphia’s schools should participate in a single stream recycling program.
The students based their presentation on a mathematical analysis of their own data collection. They took a hands-on approach -emptying trash bins and bringing recyclables back to the environmental classroom so they could rinse, sort, package, count and weigh the materials. Analyzing their school’s trash, the students discovered that an astonishing 85% of the materials that were thrown away could be recycled. Of that 85%, 50% consisted of paper and 30%-35% consisted of plastic, aluminum and glass.
The students’ research established that recycling is cost effective. It costs $100 to dump one ton of trash into a landfill, not including transportation. In just one year, the Earth Force team at Lincoln High School collected 17,000 lbs of paper, 35,000 plastic drink bottles, 275 lbs of aluminum, over 500 glass containers, 300 cell phones, and 500 inkjet and laser cartridges.
Based on what they collected, the students did a mathematical analysis. They discovered that if all 37 high schools in Philadelphia were to recycle, the reduction of trash would be enormous : 629,000 lbs of paper, 1,295,000 drink containers, 10,175 lbs of aluminum, and 18,500 glass drink containers would be diverted from the waste stream.
In addition to all the work they devoted to recycling in their school, many students on the Lincoln team contributed one Saturday a month to volunteer for The Friends of Pennypack Park community recycling program. Through this program, the Lincoln students collected another 32,000 pounds of paper and 9,000 pounds of plastic. As one student said, “just do the math - the savings are tremendous, for the environment and for everyone!”