Filled to the Brim: Landfills

  Welcome to the highly anticipated weekly blog. I am so glad to have you back for this week’s installment of green material. Today I focus on the results or the vision of these posts which illustrates the starting of school recycling programs across the United States. “Annual school waste totals well over 530,000 tons of food with a staggering 45 million gallons of milk also wasted. This leads to an estimated whopping $1.7 billion lost total.” (Neese, 2020) This continues on from our previous week's issue by showing the waste in just food products and also by restating our goal to reduce the amount of waste created at schools and prevent it from reaching landfills. The intent is to reach school teachers, administrators, and even directors of school districts. There are programs that exist to start recycling programs in schools and limit the waste sent to landfills such as thegreenteam.org. On their site, they state “Before a recycling program can be developed and implemented at ...

  1.        Welcome everyone this blog will be used to show the grave amounts of waste created by schools when recycling could be used to help limit the unnecessary waste in our landfills. In a special study done in Minnesota they found “By extrapolation, this means an estimated 483,520 lb of waste are generated per day at Minnesota K-12 public schools.” (Control Agency, 2018) Furthermore, they found in that same research “Twenty-eight percent ( 28%) of school waste, by weight, could be diverted into the recycling stream.” (Control Agency, 2018) This is only in Minnesota but they recorded “Substantial components of the waste stream in Minnesota schools could be reduced, recycled or composted” (Control Agency, 2018) This problem is happening in Minnesota but is it also happening in your schools? I challenge you to find out! 2.       Why should you care? This is a question I receive a lot when it comes to recycling and landfills. On the ...

  When schools were sampled in Minnesota the details found were shocking “ Recyclable paper (cardboard, white office paper, and mixed paper) accounted for 23.5% of the total waste generated by schools.” (Control Agency, 2018) This waste is normally just discarded by students and teachers in the school districts as seen by "this means an estimated 483,520 lb of waste are generated per day at Minnesota K-12 public schools." (Control Agency, 2018) . This additional unnecessary waste should be recycled, or our landfills will continue to grow, effectively costing more money as seen in the EPA annual report " In 2018, in the United States, approximately 292 million tons of the waste generated, approximately 69 million tons were recycled and 25 million tons were composted. Together, about 94 million tons were recycled or composted, equivalent to a 32.1 percent recycling and composting rate” (EPA, 2020)  The intent of this blog is to discuss opening schools to teaching recyclin...