Student-led recycling initiative gets top marks: principal

BY MARC LALONDE

marc.lalonde@transcontinental.ca

As far as learning projects go, this one was a no-brainer.

When Riverdale High School Grade 10 students Lisa Rosenberger and Jodie Kazenel approached principal Tom Rhymes about recycling the school’s annual locker clean-out, he couldn’t believe no one had ever thought of it before. “I mean, it just seems so logical,” he said.

Rhymes bought in, and when classes and exams wrapped up in late June, Riverdale students ridding themselves of the mountains of paper that can build up in a high-school student’s locker over the course of a year was dumped into 75-litre recycling bins rather than tossed away and burned. “I remember saying ‘Gee, I never thought of that,’ because it was a really great idea, and when I mentioned it to (other school principals), they all thought it was a great idea as well,” he said. “Usually, the kids just

toss it all, but now all that material can be used again.”

The advertising campaign for the recycling days started in the last month of classes, and led up to the big days in June. First went the senior students, then the juniors.

The student organizers said the student body bought in big to the idea. “Last year, we saw kids just throwing stuff out, all this paper. People really seemed to get into it,” said Dollard des Ormeaux resident Rosenberger. “This is better for the environment, and everybody got into it because, we already have a recycling program at the school; we just didn’t do it when we cleaned out our lockers before.”

Kazenel, also a Dollard resident, said the idea came to the pair last year, as the students stood watching paper after paper flutter down into the trash. “We saw all the kids putting all that material in the trash, and we wanted to do something. If we all do our part for the environment, that can go a long way,” she said.

Not only did they set up the recycling bins to ensure that paper didn’t end up in the garbage, Rhymes added, they provided boxes by each bin into which students could pitch their unused school supplies - pens, pencils, art supplies — to be donated to the school’s resource department.

When the sessions were complete, the students sorted the material and handed it over. “These are some impressive young people,” he said, adding Riverdale would continue the tradition next year and hoped other schools follow suit. “It’s such an easy thing to do.”쇓