How would you improve your school recycling effort?

This continues a series of essays written by Carson City School District students who won a recycling essay contest sponsored by the Educator's Closet. Winning students received a laptop valued at $200.

by Meagan Machart

For the Appeal

When I was asked this question, I thought about it really hard, and many ideas went through my head. I thought about what my school already does, and what it could improve on doing. So, here's the question: "How would you improve your school's recycling effort?"

Do you have any ideas? Well, here are some of my own ideas.

My first idea is to have an assembly at every school and have people come talk to us about how much nicer recycling would be for our community, and how much cleaner the outcome of many people working just a little harder to make our town look neater with less trash and more people recycling.

My next idea is to do something that will make our school participate more in recycling. So, this is what we could do: We could have games and activities during lunch to get the students and teachers to participate more, and at the same time, we would also be having fun. We could continue these activities or games for a week or two, and we can do different activities each day. It would be a lot of fun. and we would be able to get our school together every day. This would be a great opportunity to get our school recycling and to learn a little more about recycling.

Another idea that I have is to reward the students for participating. We can have a type of fundraiser when each student goes home and gets help from the rest of their family to collect as many cans as they can. They will only have a certain amount of time, like a month, and at the end of that time period, they would bring in all of the cans that they collected over that period of time. Each grade - freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors - would put their cans together and see which grade collected the most cans. I then think that the school should turn all of the cans that were collected in to collect money to make our school have nicer supplies, like new textbooks or more supplies for teachers.

My last idea is to remind the students before lunch each day to recycle their bottles and cans and throw away their trash. I think all of my ideas are great ways to improve our school's recycling effort because it would get both students and teachers more involved in recycling, and I think it will work really well.

-- Meagan is a ninth-grader at Carson High School.