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Recycling Paper In Sept. 1989 Pike began to recycle paper. It was a home room project to decorate the room’s cardboard recycling receptacle. Every Tues. during I block (the last period of school on some days) members of student committee canvassed assigned areas of the school to gather the paper, box by box and then return each box to its respective room. The one box at a time scurrying back and forth all over the school created a real beehive of activity on Tuesday afternoons. In the intervening 18 years recycling has grown steadily more centralized through its imperfections and various morphs. In 03-04 and 04-05 Pike used 180 cases of paper with 5000 sheets of paper per case. In 05-06 it was a 185 cases. In 06-07 it was 210 cases! Our next goal is to reduce that number. Using less paper helps everyone. Fewer trees are cut down and transported. Less wasted paper to be recycled. Less land turned into landfill. Less money wasted on buying new paper. Less ink used. Less water used in the production of more paper. Less electricity and fuel used to make the paper, to transport the paper, to transport to recycling, to sort, to transport to prefabricate, to prefabricate, to transport back to New England Office Supply, and finally to transport back to school. Recycled paper is sorted in Lawrence but remade into recycled paper in China. That is a lot of transportation back and forth. Transportation uses up fossil fuels and contributes to global warming. Imagine if we could reduce the number of cases we use per year by one. Imagine if every school did that.
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Earth Day Celebrations In 2001 Pike’s Lower School, grades Pre-K through second, began an annual Earth Celebration in April. The opening ceremony Master of Ceremonies is Trash. Trash is a rascal. (In reality he is a hand puppet played by a ninth grade student.) Trash looks like a rodent, part squirrel, part groundhog, and very ignorant. Trash doesn’t know anything about recycling, reusing or reducing. He pretends to know a lot, but actually he does not know much. Each year that Trash comes to the Lower School he has to learn how to use a reusable cup, how to use the ‘other’ side of the paper, and how to put used paper in the recycling instead of the ‘trash’ bin. This year Trash took his lessons from Panda, another ninth grade hand puppeteer. Panda is very wise about how to help our planet. Lower School Earth Day had begun in ‘01 by asking: “What understandings are we looking for? Are we getting acquainted with new folks? Are we beginning to recognize excessive packaging in lunch preparation? Are we aware of the value of recycling? Can we express our appreciation for our planet? Do we know more about our planet and how it works?” By 2006-07 the format had grown to making every day Earth Day all year long. Assemblies run by the children all through the year address reducing, reusing and recycling in many different venues. By April the children were able to explain to Trash why he had to change his ways. |
| Last updated: 5-14-2007 | |
Welcome!
Welcome to the sustainable living website of Pike School in Andover, MA, created by our 9th grade class of 2007 and our 7th grade Tech Corps. We hope that the ideas and practices described here will inspire you in your home, business or community to look for ways to use fewer of our planet’s natural resources. Sustainable living calls for rethinking how we heat our homes, fuel our cars, light our buildings, grow our food…the systems of our lives. We hope that this site will help you think about how you can effect environmental change at school, at home, and the world.
(Picture: www.sustainablesarasota.com.)