How to Turn Your School Green
By Courtney Han
The best way to get your school to go green is to start an environmental club. There are a lot of other people out there that care about the environment as much as you do, so forming a club is a great way to organize your efforts, brainstorm ideas, and even make friends. Clubs make it easier to spread awareness about a topic through word of mouth and organizing events. Through your club, you can create researched proposals and petitions for your school as to why they should make certain changes and how these changes will benefit both Earth and your school.
A major environmental problem that schools have is the amount of paper used in the classroom, with most of it going into the trash instead of getting recycled. The first step to a greener school is to encourage less paper usage, install recycling bins in all classrooms, and use recycled paper. This will cut back on the amount of trees and raw materials used in the process of making paper. According to greenschools.net, if schools replace one tone of regular paper with one ton of 35% recycled paper, 734 pounds of greenhouse gasses will be kept out of the air and water, along with 3,500 pounds of toxic sewage.
Many colleges send out a lot of junk mail to try to entice possible students into visiting or applying to their school. This is also a waste of paper because these letters are most likely getting thrown right into the trash. Try to convince your school to send these letters out through email as much as possible. Not only will this save a lot of paper, it will also save the school a lot of money.
Another way to have your school go green is to install as many recycling bins as possible, and actually have the contents get recycled. Many schools have recycling bins but do not have the funds to get the recycled contents picked up, so the “recycle” ends up with the trash. Through an environmental club, you can have recycling bins put in the areas in which the most paper is used, like the library or a study hall. If the school is unable to get the recycling picked up, you can make recycle collection a service of the club and have a different person pick up the recycled materials to dispose of them.