EarthCARE's Club at Greenbank

By Gary O'Brien, Team Leader, April 23, 2006

The EarthCARE Club aims to promote environmentally friendly habits and practices at school, but also at home. One of the biggest endeavours at school is to promote recycling but also, reusing and reducing the amount of paper used. Recycling is done once a week, when all paper, cardboard products are put together to be emptied in a special bin, to be used solely for recycling paper. We could also recycle cans and bottles, but this makes it difficult as quite often, cans are not properly emptied. This has as a consequence to ruin the whole program, as the recycling company would not take paper mixed with the content of leaking cans. Then, everything goes into the dump...

It is unfortunate that we have to abandon the recycling of cans, but this is an excellent occasion to bring the message home that, after all, why bring cans to school. Aluminum is made of bauxite, a metal which is, of course, non renewable. Plastic bottles are also made from a non renewable source, but at least they can be reused and are easier to recycle, too.

We will try to engage in a range of activities on top of recycling: regular newsletter articles, posters, poster contests, etc. The door is opened to anyone with ideas on how to better uphold the protection of our fragile world.

Many students are participating. Ask Maria, Hanna, Meghan, Caitlin, Chelsea, Annalyssa, Alison, Jocelyn, Alexandra, or Emily about joining. If parents also wish to volunteer, we could use adult supervision at times when our teams are doing their recycling run during recess. You can contact me at school on Beam. We can all make a difference, no matter how small it is.