Today's Plainfield Herald News (an edition of The Herald News) includes a story about a Plainfield girl who started a recycling program at her school last year, when she was in fourth grade. Kelsey Kumrow's efforts even prompted the district to start with her school when they started recycling at the schools.
"A self-confessed 'sucker for the environment,'" the story reads, "Kelsey said she loves
animals and nature too much to see pollutants from non-recyclables harm the earth. 'My family is passionate about teaching others about recycling and doing it at home,' Kelsey said."
My first thought was that this story sounded pretty familiar (more on that in a minute), but my second thought was, "Ohmigod, you're telling me Plainfield School District is only doing district-wide recycling in the fall of THIS year?!?"
Schools generate tons of paper and other recyclables. Please tell me this wasn't going into landfills with only one lone fourth-grader to stop the flow.
End of rant.
That said, the story was pretty darn familiar. In sixth-grade, lo so many years ago, my friends and I started a club to recycle our school's waste.
We pitched our idea to the principal, who was very kind despite the repeated spelling error of "recyling." (I suspect that embarrassment, courtesy of our friend Kate, may have influenced me to go into editing.)
We got a math teacher to agree to run the club, and we were off. We collected the cardboard boxes paper reams came in, marked them and put them in every classroom. Coca-Cola donated huge bins to go next to vending machines for soda cans.
We spent free periods collecting from our bins, and we filled a spare storage room with stacks of paper and the cans we spent hours emptying and flattening.
Kind teachers or custodians would drive truckloads of our collection to a recycling plant whenever the room became to smelly, too full or too hazardous.
During my three years at the school, I noticed we were fishing fewer and fewer cans and papers out of regular garbage bins. Students were getting used to recycling.
I hope it stuck with them.
So, Kelsey, I salute you. You did a good thing keeping those bottles out of a landfill. You made students and the district aware that there was a lot of waste happening and that very little was being done about it. And to Kelsey's mom, who helped with the transportation and logistics, you're doing a great job raising a responsible kid and your priorities are in the right place -- you're making sure there will still be a decent planet when Kelsey helping her fourth-grade children do their part.
Julie Todd is the night editor at The Herald News in Joliet. She and her
husband are looking to cut the chemicals and get back to basics -- minus the
granola and hemp clothing. They live in a home they bought last year in
Plainfield, where they're making changes to create their own little patch of
utopia.
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