A Green Welcome Back to School!

How will you Reduce, Reuse and Recycle this school year? The Green Team has some ideas!

First of all, a great way to reduce waste in the school cafeteria is to pack your child’s lunch using reusable containers. You can find these in many of our local stores or online. The list below has some great sites for these kinds of products.

www.resnackit.com - You can find snack bags, sandwich bags, hoagie bags, and other great ways to pack your kids lunches.

www.laptoplunches.com - It has eco-friendly lunch boxes that contain NO phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA), or lead. It also has great ideas for packing healthy lunches.

www.kleankanteen.com - It offers safe alternative to plastic or lined aluminum bottles. It also offers an insulated bottle that does triple duty as a mug, a thermos and a food container. Insulated Kanteens® keep contents hot for up to 6 hours, while iced drinks stay frosty cold for more than 24 hrs.

The Green Team is very excited to help support the school’s new Engineering and Science Lab and together find ways to reuse everyday materials. We hope you will too, by collecting these materials at home and sending them to school on the weekly collection days. The following list indicates some of the items that will be collected.

plastic jugs buttons

plastic lids spools

water bottles craft sticks

yogurt or cottage cheese containers clothespins

vitamin containers corks

empty film canisters beads

berry baskets string

butter tubs and lids thread

oatmeal containers

egg cartons

heavy duty paper plates

laughing cow-cheese containers

The Green Team will continue to host Recycling Bonanzas in November and April, when we collect items such as empty glue sticks and Scotch tape dispensers. Last year we collected thousands of glue sticks and sent them to a company called TerraCycle. TerraCycle convert the collect waste into a wide variety of products and materials. We receive points for the items we send in and then can make donations to different charities. We accumulated enough points that we were able to make the following donations.

• Planting 4 trees in an American forest

• Adopting one acre of wildlife

• Giving clean water to two people for a year

We hope you will help us continue to make a difference by helping us collect these items for our Bonanzas!

You Can Recycle That?

Bettie Weaver Elementary held another Recycling Roundup this past fall and we were very happy with the number of items that were brought in to be recycled and saved from being placed in landfills, so thank you to all that participated in this earth-friendly cause. BWE collects cell phones, digital cameras, printer cartridges, plastic grocery bags, yogurt cups, glue sticks, bottle caps, tape dispensers and tape cores. All of these are either taken to stores that recycle them, sent to recycling programs or used by the school's art teacher for projects. With the success of the Recycling Roundup, we wanted to make you aware of more more items that can be recycled: #5 plastics - which includes yogurt cups, cream cheese, margarine, and sour cream containers can all be recycled. Whole Foods Grocery in Short Pump collects the #5 plastics, which we cannot place in our curbside recycling. Whole Foods uses them to make toothbrushes and razors. So please remember to clean them and save them to bring to Whole Foods the next time you shop there. And if you don’t shop at Whole Foods, you can send in to the next Recycling Roundup at BWE. We also wanted to make you aware that Lowe's Home Improvement has added new recycling containers inside their store located at the West Koger Center. You can now bring your rechargeable batteries and energy efficient light bulbs to Lowe's for recycling. Batteries and energy efficient light bulbs contain mercury and should not be placed in the regular trash. As more of our light bulbs get replaced with these energy efficient bulbs it is nice to know you can bring your old ones to Lowe's anytime, instead of waiting once a year for Chesterfield County's special recycling days. Lastly, one other item which can be recycled, if you are not aware, is pet's fur. Don’t laugh, donated pet fur was recycled and used as clean up material for Gulf Coast Oil Spill. Ask your dog groomer next time if they recycle the fur! Or if you groom your pets yourself and need ideas on how to fur-recycle check out this website.www.ecosalon.com/how-to-make-pet-hair-work-for-you-not-against-you/

"Those CVWMA trucks go straight to the landfill with all that recycling!"

Have you heard that rumor? Wondered if it could be true? Because I have. But I was lucky enough to go on a tour of the TFC Recycling Facility off of Route 10 on Chester just last week. And let me tell you, it was loud, it was smelly, and boy, were they getting some recycling done!

This video does a better job than I ever could of explaining the process. But I did learn some interesting facts. TFC collects recycling from 247,000 households every other week. Their drivers are paid by the ton, which makes them happy on rainy days and also ensures that they collect as much recycling as they possibly can! They can only recycle narrow necked plastics with a 1 or 2, no fruit containers! And TFC is in the business to make money, so they are keeping their eyes on commodity prices, sending their aluminum to Kentucky and newspaper to Georgia and cardboard to China, where they get the most $$, that is where they send it.