This is a guest post by Kimberly Gou, student at Bravo High School in LA. 

Hi everyone! My name is Kimberly, and I’m a member of the Focus Team at Bravo High School, which is in the wonderful city of Los Angeles. Our club, named Campus Beautification, has many projects, new and old, but out of all of them, our recycling program is by far our oldest project.

We start at the beginning of the year by putting letters in teachers’ boxes asking them if they would like a box to recycle paper or bottles and cans. On the letter, we also tell them when our pickup dates are. Usually, teachers use the boxes from the year before, but some teachers end up needing new ones if their old one is damaged, or if the teacher is new. We set a deadline for the papers to be returned to us, and after the deadline, we make a spreadsheet of all the teachers as rows and two columns, one for paper boxes and the other for cans and bottles boxes. Then, we check off the names of the teachers requesting boxes.

At the club meeting, we then explain to the club members the procedures of our pickups and distribute the assignments of making the boxes. We make the boxes using empty snack boxes from the Student Store, and we take them to our club members, who decorate them by first covering them with construction paper, and then adding stickers, words, drawings, etc. to make them more attractive. We also specify whether the box is for recycling paper or bottles and cans. We try to set a deadline for the boxes, but sometimes, having a loose deadline but a lot of reminders is very effective. Furthermore, we offer 1 volunteer hour per box, and this is an incentive that many people like.

Once we have all our boxes done, we start distributing them to the teachers. (Often, they can’t wait for their boxes!) Every Friday after school, a group of about 6-8 club members empty out the boxes. People sign up at our weekly meeting to help with the Friday pick-up, and on Friday, they go to our advisor’s room to wait for our club president, who assigns them certain floors and gives each group 2 of the big trash bags. Since our school is concentrated into 1 building with 5 floors, the groupings are the 1st and 2nd floor, the 3rd floor, and the 4th and 5th floor. However, we do give extra bags to the groups since the boxes are often very full, and one bag might not be enough. We work with our janitorial staff to make sure the rooms are open, but most of the time, teachers stay after school. As for the teachers who never stay after school, we ask them to leave their boxes in the hallway, and we pick them up and leave the boxes there.

When all the rooms are done (or at least all that we could have done) we take the bags down to the large recycle bins for the city to pick up. This is a win-win situation for the club: we give members hours for doing the Friday pick-up, and our school does receive the money we get for recycling!

Tips for success:

Boxes:

• Usual size: about 1.5 ft. x 2 ft. x 2.5 ft.

• We like to use colorful butcher paper to cover it, and stickers that we get from the city promoting recycling.

• We also suggest putting environmental facts on boxes.

Pick-up:

• Our club has high participation in these pick-ups – often, we have many more people than we need, but we let them stay, particularly because the pick-ups are a way for our members to hang out with each other at school (our school has students from all over the district, so this is very important to many).

• Concentrate on areas of high traffic and places where everyone has classes: for us, it’s the 3rd floor, with all the English teachers, but for other schools, it will be in different places.

• Have fun with it! Members are doing this to help out, so it’s okay if they play around, as long as they get the recycling done.