NY Post article on Recycling

Here is the letter I submitted to the NY Post after their article on recycling, or lack thereof, in NYC schools:

Thanks to the Post for your article on the lack of recycling in schools. As a teacher in the NYC DOE, I face this problem everyday. I started and ran a recycling program in Brooklyn for 2 years. It was no easy task.

The first issue is acquiring supplies: real garbage bins (not dirty recycling bins), and new and clean recycling bins, large clear bags, plastic gloves, and wheeled collection bin for each floor. We received a grant for $1,500 from Donors Choose for these. Decals, posters, curriculum, and videos came from the Department of Sanitation, who also awarded our program $1,500 for their Golden Apple Awards.

The next is collection. Students participate eagerly, but without a supportive infrastructure, the collection is either thrown out by custodians or not collected by Sanitation (we experienced both). Realistically, each school building needs a trained professional whose sole responsibility is to see that recycling codes are followed.

We are, after all, in the business of educating the future. We are mis-educating them, if the teaching of recycling isn’t on the bill. I want to rally support for a massive recycling initiative in this city. Please contact me by enlisting with Recycle THIS!.

Letter To Klein

Here's an idea... what if everyone (parents, teacher, students, and the public at large) wrote their own passion letter to Chancellor Klein to persuade him to pay attention to recycling in schools and take action. Why not submit your 350 words or less letter to Klein now?

Here's the letter I wrote:

I am a math teacher in my 6th year working for the DOE in NYC. I became aware of the recycling problem when I saw old dirty recycling bins used as garbage cans throughout the building and every DOE school building I've been in since that first day. So frustrated and bothered by this situation, in 2004, I started a school-wide recycling program at my school, I.S. 33, with a grant for $1,500 from Donors Choose to buy new bins, and garbage bins for each classroom, bottle containers for cafeteria, main office, and teachers lounge, collection bags, gloves, and wheeled containers. I acquired training materials from the Sanitation Department and conducted assemblies to the student body. I recruited student volunteers to collect the recyclables. We experienced many problems including, custodians throwing away recyclables, cafeteria staff not recycling properly, and the Department of Sanitation not coming to pick up the curbside recycling for weeks on end.

I wrote the award submission for the Golden Apple Awards and received honorable mention, since ours was one out of 3 schools in the building recycling. Only a handful of schools participate in this contest since it's clear that very few schools have recycling programs. Because of lack of an infrastructure to support my efforts or any type of compensation for my tremendous efforts, I have little motivation to take on such a burdensome task in the future. I was inspired by the NY Post's article on the school recycling situation.

The DOE has a big job to undertake in order to abide by your own regulation with regards to school recycling. But we are in the business of educating the future, yet we are mis-educating them, if the teaching of recycling isn't on the bill. I want to rally support for a massive recycling initiative in this city. I'm forming a group to take action and am asking for your support and assistance with this matter.

Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage

Watch the video on-line:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/11/22/gone-tomorrow-the-hidden-life-of-garbage-video/

How to start a school recycling program?

Do you often find yourself uttering this very question?

Well here's how I did it:

Step 1. Request necessary publications, decals, poster, videos, coloring books, magnets, etc from the NYC Department of Sanitation. http://www.nyc.gov/recycle

Step 2: Replace old dirty blue recycling bins that are coated with trash from their many years serving as garbage bins in teh school with real garbage bins and sparkling new blue recycling bins for paper only in every classroom. This cost $1,500 for a school with 4 floors and approximately 500 students grades 6 - 8. I wrote and we receive a grant from http://www.donorschoose.org. The grant also paid for large CLEAR (not blue) collection bags, a wheeled collection bin for each floor, bottle collection bins for the cafeterias and main office, and sanitary gloves for the kids to collect with.

Step 3: Train your community and work out collection issues. Department of Sanitation provides the training videos. Simply organize an assembly and then recruit kids to help collect. They will eagerly volunteer. Figure out a time during the week for them to collect from each classroom. You have to really butter up your custodial staff so that they will leave the recycling alone (otherwise it might get thrown out). I had an after-school club of kids would collected the paper and bottles, weighed it, graphed it, and finally used a huge rolling bin to take the paper out to the curb the night before "collection." I put collection in quotes because I could never get a clear answer on when that collection was and our recyclables would sometimes sit for weeks on end out side the school until papers slip open and littered the streets. We'd call repeatedly and many times the excuse was that we weren't allowed to use blue bags (which we used at first since they were left over). This right here is to me the largest issue about having a program... there isn't an infrastructure in the city or the DOE to support a culture of recycling. It's a mind-set and a value system that must be taught in school in order for it change anything on a large scale.

Step 4: Promote the program by having a recycling poster making contest and offering a cash prize for the winner. Hang the posters in the lobby and ask teachers to vote on their favorites with a ballot box in the main office.

Step 5: Monitor the progress of students and staff. Students should keep a log when collecting and document the amount of paper in the bins and any garbage found in bins. Teachers with garbage in their bins will be issued a summons for $1 to support the recycling program. Students can write up the summons at the club meeting after-school too.

Step 6: Apply for the Sanitation Department's Golden Apple Awards by taking pictures and documenting your program. http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/recycling_schools.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/recycling_schools.shtml . We won honorable mention for our program since our entire building wasn't recycling. We shared the building with three other schools, which made our school ineligible for any prize other than honorable mention. Another flaw of the

Step 7: Celebrate by distributing t-shirts, award certificates, prizes, and cake to all of the students that participated in the poster making contest and the recycling team all year.

Do you have any additional ideas or resources? I'd love to take a trip to MRF. They show one on the sanitation videos and kids asked to go see one, but as far as I know, you can't.

City Limits Article: THE TRASHMAN COMETH: TOWARD A WASTE-FREE CITY

City Limits Article: THE TRASHMAN COMETH: TOWARD A WASTE-FREE CITY

Here's another great article on NYC Recycling by City Limits.

http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=3294

NYCSRAC First Meeting Minutes

Last night a few of us braved the cold, rain, noise and crowds to meet up at the Village Pour House for our School Recycling Action Committee Meeting.

We had a huge table in the back, but it was super noisy and almost impossible to hear people. Seven people were in attendance: Coquille, Chong, Dave, Micki, Sarah, John, and Marie. We tried our best to discuss the issues at our schools and the individual interests. Coquille shared NYC RRR curriculum kit from the Department of Sanitation (order one for yourself), her Golden Apple Award binder, and copies of the Post article and the NYC DOE regulations on recycling, which states that all schools are required by law to recycle and must set up a recycling program by assigning recycling coordinators at every level: All DOE offices and schools. We know these regulations are not be followed or enforced! You can see the copies at Educating Tomorrow look under groups and then NYC School Recycling blog. We we will be this Group to post ideas about actions we can all be taking in our schools and on our computers to push our schools and the HUGE DOE to do it's job and start recycling programs.

Chong shared his work with Soul Survivors Inc. on composting programs in the city and the possibility of working with schools to institute compost training and worm bins. He is also working on the creative end on comic strips and educational materials for kids on composting. Micki expressed her interest in working with him specifically on training kids at her school since she is starting a unit of study on waste, garbage and recycling. Compost would be an excellent addition to unit and could be a very cool way to learn math and science!

Dave shared his interest in starting a recycling program for environmental and educational reasons, and Micki and Dave decided to work together to start a recycling program at their school as part of their exploration day curriculum in the 6th and 7th grade. Micki discussed the issues she experienced starting a recycling program at her old school. She also discussed an article from City Limits the great resource, documentary, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.

Sarah and John shared about their school's lack of recycling program. John shared a few ideas of better venues for our meetings. I guess I should have written down the names, but he will be emailing them to me.

As we get ready for our next meeting, Chong had the great idea of focusing on creating a Media Kit on this issue. He'd like to form a Think Tank to tackle the creation of a kit that will bring more attention to this issue. At our next meeting, we will focus on what will go in our kit and how we can share in its creation.

In the meantime, SPREAD THE WORD! Sign up with this Group and share it with your friend. Power in numbers! Our next meeting will be in December. If you have suggestions about a good venue, let us know!

Coquille and I are planning to attend the Radical Teachers meeting at Bluestocking at 2:30pm this Sunday. If you are interested, try to come to the meeting and/or email me when a convenient day/time for you to meet up is and do you have any ideas on a place that would be large enough, less crowded, quiet and GREEN? Maybe Bluestocking is a good choice. I'll try to talk to them about their space and time options.

Talk to you soon,

Micki

P.S. To stay connected to this issue join our GROUP: Educating Tomorrow. Click Groups, then NYC Schools Recycling to communicate about ideas, questions, and meetings... but also, we'll use RecycleThis.org and NYCoRE to send out announcements and meetings too... so you will be covered if you are on either list.

Who and what is the School Recycling Action Committee

Who and what is the School Recycling Action Committee?

Coquille and I (Micki AKA mathjosi) are both crazy Oregon hippie chicks who came to NYC to find experience in the big city. Coming for a very green town of Eugene, Oregon, we were stunned and amazed by the amount of waste and lack of environmental awareness that we'd become accustomed to. Both NYC Teaching Fellows (me - teaching middle school math, she teaching bilingual elementary), we were horrified by the dismal sight of dirty old blue recycling bins in every classroom being used only for garbage, no thought or mention of recycling, littered cafeterias, hallways, and classrooms.... not to mention neighborhoods and students who found it common place to throw trash on the sidewalks, streets, on the floor, in the desks, and even out the window. We inspired each other to take on the volunteer role of recycling coordinator in addition to our demanding teacher duties in tough Brooklyn schools. I started and ran my program for two years in a shared building with two other schools, while she simultaneously did the same at her elementary school, which occupied her entire building. We shared ideas about how to work with our custodians, acquire the necessary bins, train our students with assemblies, held promotional contests, and contacted Sanitation constantly about the problems we were experiencing with their collection which is infrequent at best or sometimes doesn't happen for weeks on end while bags of recycables become litter all over the side walk and streets.

Finally we documented the whole process to present to New York City's Department of
Sanitation's Golden Apple Awards. You can see our proposals and all of the proposals of the other winners at this link. Her prize was $3,000. My prize $750. The difference: Her school occupies the entire building, while my school shared a building with two other schools. Currently, under their award guidelines, only entire buildings are eligible to win the Golden Apple Awards, even though the trend in the DOE is towards smaller schools sharing large buildings (like the three schools I've worked in).

So now that I've changed schools, I'm excited yet apprehensive to begin the process of starting another program. What we've learned through our individual school experiences is that training the kids, our job, is the easy part. Students want to do the right thing and eagerly participated in contests by writing songs, rap, poetry, and making posters. They also love to participate in collection, weighing, recording and graphing the results. But recycling is too much work for one teacher to do since the custodial staff and sanitation don't seem to be on board in this equation. We both experienced custodians throwing out the recyclable materials after students had so carefully sorted it, removed garbage, and bagged it up. We both spent countless hours on our personal cell phones repeatedly trying to get answers about how and when sanitation would pick our recyclables or to report missed collection that has sat on the curb, littering the sidewalk with paper for weeks on end.

This is an outrage and the biggest problem with recycling in this city! How can we hope to improve this situation if we don't educate the children: Educate Tomorrow!? How can we hope to educate the students so that they won't be swimming in a sea of all of our filth and surplus of needless, senseless waste if we can't train them to recycle in schools? Who is supposed to educate them to be stewards of th earth if not in SCHOOLS?? Why isn't anyone speaking up on this issue? Where are the voices? WE NEED TO AND MUST CRY OUT FOR JUSTICE! How hard is it to sort your waste, watch it, be accountable for it, look at it, problem solve ways to reduced, reuse, and recycle, take on personal responsibility for the good of all the living creature on the earth especially ourselves?? Yes, we are living in a selfish wasteful world and the ironic part is that we aren't even looking out for our own best interest because of it. If we live our lives oblivious to and surrounded by trash isn't it because we ourselves feel like trash, how can we not? Don't we deserve better for ourselves and our children. Why are the people in charge not doing their jobs to ensure a sound future on this planet? How can we sit by and let this happen knowingly right before our eyes and say nothing, do nothing? Isn't it our job as educators to take on the job of teaching the children how to behave and live in a world? How can we allow them to constantly litter their home where they live everyday with no though of where their garbage goes, what happens to it, what they need to do to make sure they take care of their only home: our plant. Do I sound like a left-wind lunatic.... all earthy, peace, hippie-chick??!! Good, then I'm doing my job... but still, be real, isn't it all the truth? So that's why we formed this committee! We want to bring ANGRY teachers, students, parents, citizens of NYC and the World together to push, fight, argue, convince, and mostly GET ACTIVE about this issue in a BIG way. We want to hit the media with letters of disgust at this situations and a call for real change! How can we improve this machine of a city? How can we shape it's future?

What is the School Recycling Action Committee? IT'S YOU! It's your stage to air your concerns, thoughts, ideas, frustration, find common minds, plan together how to teach environmental stewardship, write letters, start a buzz and massive push in the city to WAKE UP, convince the people around you that it's not ok to just throw it all away! How can we rethink our city, so that we can help the children build the world of their future. NYC has had enough of the easy wasteful life of consuming and disposing thoughtlessly. Let's get together and shake things up! Let's take ACTION!

Email me mathjosi@yahoo.com, if you want to come to a meeting... or sign up on the listserve for www.recyclethisnyc.org, www.nycore.org, or www.educatingtomorrow.org

Mick Josi
NYC 6th Grade Math Teacher
MS 447 - Math & Science Exploratory School

"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead

Letter to Bloomberg

I sent the following letter to the mayor on the city's website. The response below the letter was from Mary Most from NYC Dept. of Sanitation's Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse & Recycling. You should contact her if you are interested in starting a school recycling program. She can provide you with information and some supplies, including decals, poster, curriculum, videos, and more. She is also the person you will work with on your Golden Apple Awards entry if you start a program. She recommends that instead of writing to the Mayor, since she will in term receive the letter and have to respond to it, that we send all letters to Chancellor Klein, since the problem is within the DOE and he's responsible for enforcing his own regulations with regard to recycling (check out Coquille's blog for a copy on the Chancellor's regulations on recycling in the DOE).

-----------------------------My Letter to the Mayor-----------------------------

As a New York City teacher fellow who started and ran a recycling program in a Bedford-Styvesant middle school for two years. I face the issues discussed by the recent Post article: “IL'LITTER'ATE SCHOOLS FLUNK THEIR RECYCLING” on a daily basis.
I have a few questions for you:
1. Why doesn’t the city promote recycling?
2. Is the city’s garbage situation at a crisis level yet? When will it be?
3. How much garbage does the city generate?
4. Where does all of our the garbage go?
5. How much of this waste is reusable and/or recyclable?
6. What will happen if we keep throwing all of these recyclable items away?
7. Can the city or school generate some kind of income from recycling?
8. Is recycling cost effective?
9. When will we be so overwhelmed with garbage we won’t have anywhere else to put it? What will happen then?
10. Why don’t people realize that this is an inevitable crisis that must and can be averted through a wide-spread reduce, reuse, and recycling effort?
11. Where is the effort and why don’t I feel it’s presence in the city?
12. Why doesn’t the city abide by it’s own laws that says: RECYCLING IS THE LAW?
13. Why aren’t people in the city government, schools, the MTA, sanitation being held accountable for obeying the recycling laws?
14. Why is it so hard to add additional bins and just sort out recyclable items?
15. Is recycling even important, really?
16. What will it take to get this city to become environmentally friendly?
17. Why is it so hard for NYC to recycle when San Francisco recycles nearly 50% of its waste?
18. Why doesn't the city have a recycling plan and goals as part of the Plan 2030?

-----------------------------Mary Most's Email Response-----------------------------

11/9/07

Hi, Micki ~

Your message submitted as feedback to the NYC.gov website was forwarded to the Commissioner of Sanitation and then to the DSNY Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling for reply.

Also, I wanted to respond to the points in the long draft you posted on RecycleThis!, proposing a letter-writing campaign to the Mayor to encourage school recycling.

Here are links to the information you’re looking for:

* Recycling is included in PlaNYC 2030 as a critical way to reduce our carbon footprint. See: http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/greenyc/greenyc.shtml

* NYC’s Solid Waste Management Plan, passed by City Council last year after extensive citizen review, directs how NYC will handle our waste for the next 20 years. See: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dsny/html/reports/swmp-4oct.shtml

* For information on: What's in NYC's Waste?, see our recently completed Waste Characterization Study at: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/waste_char_study.shtml

* Note especially the WCS pie charts and comprehensive Results Highlights. See pie charts at http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/wcs_charts.shtml

* For street basket recycling, please see Public Space Recycling at http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/recycling/public_space_recycling.shtml

* Also see our Frequently Asked Question, Why doesn’t New York City provide recycling containers on subway platforms?

* Recycling in Schools: DSNY-BWPRR handles several hundred requests from schools annually for our free information (decals, signs, posters, and educational materials) to help NYC schools set up their recycling programs. We also offer technical support: DSNY BWPRR Recycling Outreach staff has visited every school in New York City multiple times with the recycling message. We have distributed over 30,000 NYC Teachers RRResource Kits, developed to provide K-5 teachers with lesson plans, videos, and supplementary coloring & DOS/Marvel comic books on recycling.

* The NY STATE Department of Education has issued a letter encouraging all schools in the state to recycle properly, and requiring all schools in the state to file a report. See http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/facplan/documents/RecyclingLetter.pdf

* The Department of Education Chancellor's regulations for public schools recycling are posted on the Dept of Education website www.nyc.gov/schools at http://docs.nycenet.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-47/A-850.pdf. (You can easily find the link on our website www.nyc.gov/nycwasteless/schools) Please contact Joel Klein, Chancellor of the Department of Education, at www.nyc.gov/schools to encourage the governing body for NYC public schools to issue a similar updated directive, urging schools to recycle properly and reduce their carbon footprint.

Congratulations on your move from IS 33 K (where you helped win the Super Recyclers contest) to MS Math & Science Explorations. I’ll be glad to work with you to get this building’s recycling program set up properly.

I hope you find this information helpful. Thank you for your continued efforts to encourage schools to recycle and reduce New York’s waste.

Mary Most, Public Information Specialist

NYC Department of Sanitation

Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse & Recycling

44 Beaver St - 6th Floor

New York, NY 10004

917-237-5622

mmost@dsny.nyc.gov

www.nyc.gov/nycwasteless

Teaching Students about Garbage and Recycling Ideas

Currently at my school we are working on a unit to teach students about garbage and recycling. Here are few of my brainstorm ideas on how we might go about it... I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback:
I have a few ideas for math lessons.

1. I'm sure we can do a lot with the Gone Tomorrow video with statistics: (I'll have to watch the video a 3rd time to make sure I got these right)
a. Only 5% of all plastic is recycled
b. Plastic is produced at 7 times the rate that it is recycled
c. Corporation produce 70 times the amount of waste as individuals
We could follow this grim video up with a few light hearted videos: Simpsons: Trash of the Titans and The Lorax. I have the Lorax and would be happy to buy Gone Tomorrow (I sent you the link before for the video on-line) and Simpson Season 9 DVDs.

2. Recyclables Mobile
Students should do a recycles scavenger hunt in order to solve and display visually their answer to:
1. How many cups are in one gallon? or How many ounces are in one gallon? They could collect 1 gallon, connect that to 4 containers that are size one quart, on each quart hang two pint size objects, on each pint two cups size objects. They could collect these items form their recycling at home and start to display them. We could simultaneously be teaching kids about recycling at home and give them decals etc to set up their own home recycling system. This might inspire students to want to create a school recycling program... we can talk more about this.

3. Calculate waste
Students could take a personal survey for one week tallying all the things they buy, recycle, and throw away. They could use the information to make a table of if everyone in the city (using the population) did the same as them, how much garbage is produced per day, week, month, year, century. We could use the site/art project Running With The Numbers, see: http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php to compare different items that are wasted... show how things can be represent artistically etc.

4. Composting and Worm bins...
Amy has ideas on how to do this with math... estimating, weighing food in and compost out etc... but I'm sure we can incorporate Science and Humanities here. I know BBG has workshops and we might be able to get worm bins for the classroom and use waste from the cafeteria to feed them. I've been talking a few people about this and have two contact that might be willing to help us teach kids about it.

5. Lastly, on the idea of students building a bridge.... perhaps they could do that with reused or recyclable materials... plastic bottles etc?

Just brainstorming ideas here. Looking forward to our next meeting to really flesh these out.

Mick Josi
6th Grade Math Teacher
MS 447 - The Math & Science Exploratory School

"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead