NEW ROCHELLE, NY — Today, Isaac Young’s students put into action what they learned about recycling.
The School Lunch Recycling Program was rolled out today and it was incredibly successful, even topping my wildest hopes. IEYMS has around 1200 students and was generating on a regular basis 32 to 36 large contractor bags of garbage. A total of 6480 bags of garbage per school year.
We set up a simple recycling station and trained the students to empty any left over liquids into one bucket and then sort any packaging into bins clearly labeled as CARTONS, COMMINGLED or PAPER, they dump the left over food into the garbage and stack the Styrofoam trays neatly.
And VOILA, at the end of lunch of the entire school, we had 2 (!!!) bags of garbage only, 2 bags of milk cartons, 1 bag of Styrofoam, 1 bin of paper, 1 bin of Commingled. This is a reduction of more then 90%.
So down from 6480 bags per school year to 360!
Both lunchroom custodians were very supportive and reported afterwards that this program makes their life much easier. All security staff did a wonderful job reiterating the new system to the students as well as taking an active role helping the students to figure the new system out. Great Job.
As an added benefit, all the unopened milk and juice cartons were put into a box to be consumed rather then being wasted. On a normal day, 50-60 pints of milk/juice were untouched yet still discarded.
Isaac Young is joining the ranks of the many schools that have already implemented this program. New Rochelle’s Webster, ALMS, and Trinity are doing a wonderful job. All of Eastchester, Tuckahoe, Ossining and Yonkers schools are recycling. When will Davis, Barnard, St. Gabe, Ward or the High School come on board?
Every day these schools are not recycling, they are throwing our Tax money in the garbage. And do we really have money to throw away in these difficult times?
