From elementary school, students learn the lesson: “reduce, reuse and recycle.” Recycling bins usually fill up quickly with plastic and cardboard. However, that does not stop people from recycling their old phones, makeup and batteries.
Coppell High School’s Eco Club is taking on the role of teaching others a new way of recycling.
Recycling has always been an important part of Eco Club. The club aims to help the environment be healthier with trash cleanups, garden work days and recycle committee meetings. However, this year, it is taking a more creative approach.
Eco Club is starting to re-teach people about recycling through a new program called Adopt A Teacher which was started by a group of students trying to expand recycling throughout the school. This is unique from what has been done before because this time they have introduced a new type of recycling called hard recycling with the help of the teachers around the campus.
“We have normal recycling and then hard to recycle things,” Eco Club sponsor Jodie Deinhammer said. “There’s certain things you can’t throw in the trash, but you also can’t put in the recycling, and we want more people to understand what goes where and how to properly recycle it.”
With that comes the real question of how they recycle these materials if it cannot be practiced the same way as paper, cardboard and plastic water bottles.
“Recycling is happening, Student Council is doing really well with paper recycling,” senior Eco Club officer Hasini Gade said. “But other materials can also be recycled and there are some organizations outside that collect them, and it helps them, right? They can reuse the materials and things like that.”
This helps Eco Club build a foundation on how it can expand the school’s recycling program by starting small and making a list of hard to recycle items. This list includes old electronics, used makeup, dead Expo markers, dead Sharpies and batteries.
“If you start recycling from the school, you can collect more of these materials,” Gade said. “Mrs. Deinhammer already does, like the new recycling box and materials that we’re collecting, like batteries and things like that.”
Rather than ignoring and wasting these items which can be put to good use, they can be turned into something people can utilize again.
To do this, they put these unwanted items in decorated cardboard boxes, which mimic recycling bins. These boxes will be kept in classrooms across CHS. To achieve this, Eco Club members who wish to participate invite a teacher of their choice to participate with them.
Then, the Eco Club member can pick up an empty cardboard or shoe box from Deinhammer’s room and take it home. At home, they have the ability to be creative by decorating the box however they want, such as painting the box any color they want or drawing a face on it.
“I wanted to do a funny theme so I made the box like a monster and I made a hole in between, so that when putting things in, it seemed like we were putting something inside the monster’s mouth,” sophomore Eco Club member Utsana Basnet said. “It was pretty fun to make.”
After the box is created, the student’s adopted teacher can keep the box in their classroom. This way, the student has officially “adopted” that teacher.
“I dropped it off at Mrs. Payne’s class and we took a picture together and then I left a note on the board saying that you can put dead Expo markers, Sharpies, old electronics and old makeup inside it, and that Eco Club will pick it up every month,” Basnet said.
However, the Eco Club officers were inspired by CHS French teacher Natalie Deines. The Eco Club members explain how they noticed how Madame Deines always kept an empty cardboard box in her classroom where her students can put old stuff inside it, kind of like a recycling bin.
So far, Eco Club has done well with how many teachers are now aware of hard to recycle materials and have their own recycling box in their room, and will continue to do better in the future as the program grows.
“It’s important because we can start some kind of foundation in recycling within the school,” Gade said. “We’re just expanding that to other classrooms and that’s pretty good.”
With the classrooms you enter at CHS, Eco Club recycling boxes are not rare to see.
“We have so many teachers participating so now they’re learning more about proper recycling but also just having those boxes in their room lets other students know,” Mrs. Deinhammer said, “It’s really just an educational campaign.”
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