{"id":2087,"date":"2012-07-17T09:20:28","date_gmt":"2012-07-17T08:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=2087"},"modified":"2012-07-17T09:20:28","modified_gmt":"2012-07-17T08:20:28","slug":"keep-america-beautiful-by-recycling-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2012\/07\/17\/keep-america-beautiful-by-recycling-less\/","title":{"rendered":"Keep America beautiful by recycling less"},"content":{"rendered":"

I once got into trouble during a talk at a school by suggesting that they should try to reduce the amount of stuff they recycled, and that cutting waste in the first place was a better project. \u00a0It fell on deaf ears because of a conventional mindset which says I recycle and therefore I'm green \/ sustainable \/ doing my bit \/ living a moral life \/ etc.<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I was reminded about this by a Keep America Beautiful<\/em> competition called Recycle-Bowl<\/a>, which is sponsored by Nestl\u00e9 and its bottled waters. \u00a0I saw all this in NAAEE's recent news update. \u00a0It's wearily predictable:<\/p>\n

The 2012 Keep American Beautiful Recycle-Bowl challenges K-12 students to collect as much\u00a0recyclable material as they can over a four-week period for the chance for their school to win a $1,000 prize. A national champion will be selected as well.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At least they don't have to make a collage, I thought, and wrote to Keep AB<\/em> suggest a parallel competition to find the school most adept at cutting its waste at source. \u00a0This is their response:<\/p>\n

Thank you for your email. I\u2019m glad you\u2019ve been on the website. \u00a0I\u2019m not sure of the UK\u2019s K-12 school recycling status but in the US not all schools are recycling. \u00a0It is not a law (federally or even in most states), it is not a municipally provided service and many schools can\u2019t even afford educational resources like books.<\/em><\/p>\n

We hope at some point in the future to grow the program (this is only its second year) and help quantify not only recycling but waste reduction. \u00a0However, that requires much more work on the part of the school. \u00a0Not only do they have to track and report recyclables, they have to track and report their waste. This will many times be a barrier for schools to participate in that portion of the contest. \u00a0Many schools in the US don\u2019t recycle at all. \u00a0In rural and less populated areas, teachers, parents and students haul recyclables to a drop-off, a collection service is not offered. \u00a0I would like the competition to focus just on recycling (for now) to help bridge that gap and get more schools recycling than do now and then bite-off a bigger piece of the apple in year 4 or 5 to do waste reduction. \u00a0We are looking to pilot the waste reduction piece in an AZ community this\u00a0 year. \u00a0We know the town provides both the recycling and waste collection service and should have good data.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our sister program, RecycleMania, for colleges and universities has been in operation for around 8 years. \u00a0They did ultimately build in a waste reduction component. We\u2019ll get there eventually.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks again for your input.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n


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I once got into trouble during a talk at a school by suggesting that they should try to reduce the amount of stuff they recycled, and that cutting waste in the first place was a better project. \u00a0It fell on...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}