There are over 120 classrooms and around 1400 students at SHS, and each of these classrooms produces a massive amount of paper waste everyday. According to Amritha Kishan, a member of team RISE, these numbers result in almost 2000 pages of paper that are thrown away at our school daily.
RISE is a team in FPS that consists of group members Abnar Fatima, Hiba Patel, Amritha Kishan, Nithya Natesan, Sanvi Singh, Maahi Bandi, Yuvha Karthikeyan, Isabelle McClung and Rebecca Jacob. Their goal is to bring education to the new recycling program at SHS, and in turn lay the foundation for a more sustainable and environmentally friendly school.
“RISE stands for recycle, innovate, sustain and empower, and we work with the school administration to reduce all forms of recyclable waste at our school– such as paper, cardboard, plastic and textile waste,” Fatima said.
According to Nicole Geiger, an AP Environmental Science teacher at SHS, the school’s lack of recycling has been a point of contention for many students and staff that believe this school has a responsibility to make more environmentally conscious actions.
However, according to SHS Principal Erin Short, recycling never stopped.
“We have been recycling,” Short said. “It’s just I think now we are educating through this Future Problem Solvers team. They came to me with the initiative to really educate the student body about what can go in the recycling bins because I think that we had kind of gotten away from that a little bit, and we hadn’t educated staff and students enough.”
Besides the lack of education on what can and can’t be recycled, contamination was an obstacle that blocked a large amount of waste from being recycled.
“The biggest obstacle is the requirement that there can’t be any contaminated items in a bin,” Short said. “If there’s any contamination, they toss the whole thing, so that’s why I said to the team of students, ‘we need to educate staff and students about what can actually go in the bins,’ and then hopefully that will help, and they have actually seen an improvement.”
The way team RISE is combating this contamination issue is by placing posters that clearly state recycling bins are paper only, and that other waste placed in recycling bins will cause contamination. Another improvement team RISE has added to the recycling program at SHS is having members personally help custodians empty the recycling bins.
“We plan on collecting the recycling every other week to help the custodians since they’re pretty understaffed,” Kishan said. “They don’t have enough people to pick up the recycling every single week, so we were planning on helping them out with that.”
Overall, recycling hasn’t made a brand-new return to SHS, but more attention has been brought to what can and cannot be recycled. Along with the education on the materials that can be recycled, the extra help for the custodians collecting the recycling will encourage SHS to be a more environmentally friendly school.
“I think that we’re headed in the direction that is going to be better for this school building,” Geiger said. “It will impact a lot of people who care about resources and conservation, so I’m excited about it.”
