WCHS students going green with campus recycling effort

Published 7:00 pm Monday, May 14, 2018

Even though it is the color of their cross-town rival, students at Warren Central High School are working to go green.

Since January, students in the environmental science class have been spearheading a school wide recycling program to help alleviate the problem of plastic bottles and aluminum cans being thrown into the trash at the school.

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After looking at what products can be recycled, the class decided to focus on plastic and aluminum because the school has cut down on its paper use in recent years as they use more computers, and neither plastic nor aluminum will decompose overtime.

“As part of environmental science, recycling and the earth is a big deal,” Carey Kitchens, who teaches the class, said. “I noticed that none of the schools in our district have a recycling program and I wanted to create one for Warren Central. I brought the idea to my students and said we need to start a recycling program for our school. From there, they just took off with it.”

Kitchens started by having her students keep a log of how much plastic and aluminum they were using to see how big of a problem there was at the school, and the results were staggering.

“Warren Central has around 1,300 students and the average student at Warren Central used three plastic bottles a day,” Kitchens said.

They figured there are roughly 2,600 plastic containers per day that aren’t being recycled and roughly 1,300 aluminum cans a day. 

After seeing the numbers, students in the environmental science were spurred into action to help combat the problem. Their first step was to draft an email to the teachers in the school highlighting the problem and asking for help.

They then had to figure out how to collect the recyclables, what to do with them and how to get the word out. While the project is still a work in progress that will continue into next year, this year’s class has laid much of the foundation and already seeing a huge response from their school.

“We looked at all the populated areas where students are and where the most traffic in the school is,” junior Adison Hearn said. “We noticed that in locations such as the bathroom and the cafeteria, people just dispose of bottles without a second thought. We decided to put our trashcans for recyclable material in those areas.”

They determined they will need 14 bins and instead of purchasing all of them, they have already repurposed some of the collected materials by giving them to the art teacher to design and build bins to collect items.

“It has been a pretty positive response,” senior Cade Walters said. “Our room was so full of bottles, we really didn’t know what to do with them. Every day I walk in there, there has been a new bag full of bottles and cans.”

They are working with the different clubs in the school to set up a schedule to collect items from the bins and are hoping to get a large recycling bin placed outside the school where everything they get can go before being picked up. 

They are also working with Thomas Mayfield, who teaches Mississippi history, to film a commercial that can help raise awareness for the project within the school.

“We had to figure out a way to teach the students at Warren Central which types of plastics could be recycled and how to do it,” Kitchens said. “We didn’t want them throwing regular garbage in the recycling bins. My students came up with the idea to film a commercial that will be sent out to the student body.”

As they work out how to dispose of the items they receive, Kitchens said her classroom has become “ground zero” for the project and is full of plastic bottles and aluminum cans.

Next year, they hope to solve the issue of how to dispose of the items, get their bins out and hopefully expand the program to sporting events and other schools in the district.

“We’d like to see the entire school district go green, because it is detrimental the amount of garbage we’re producing that’s recyclable,” Kitchens said.