Piloting a recycling program for New Hanover County schools
Every Monday morning, a green team of Gregory Elementary School students sweeps the classrooms with cardboard boxes that are soon piled high with paper, mixed paper and discarded paper that has been set aside for recycling. The boxes are hauled to a weigh station in the cafeteria, where the results are tabulated and marked on a scoreboard for all of the kindergarten through fifth-grade classes to see.
The project is the independent study initiative of University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW)
Supplied photo courtesy of Marilyn Graham
From left, Lynn Betsul, New Hanover County recycling coordinator; Marilyn Graham, UNCW student; Walter Engle, Gregory Magnet School assistant principal; Maria Greene, principal; and Vince Sanudo of A-1 Sanitation, who donated shirts to the student recycling team, all played a role in Graham’s school recycling project. |
entrepreneurship and business development student Marilyn Graham, and launched in February.
“My UNCW Cameron Executive Network (CEN) mentor Gene Wingerter … helped me with making contact with Lynn Bestul, New Hanover County recycling coordinator. [Bestul] suggested the pilot recycling program idea,” Graham said from her Southport home.
Dr. Jack Hall, dean of the UNCW Environmental Studies program, encouraged her to contact Dr. Al Lerch, superintendent of New Hanover County schools.
“They were very helpful,” Graham said. “He e-mailed all the schools, and I got e-mails from six.”
From those that responded, Graham selected Gregory Elementary School, a science, math and technology magnet school in downtown Wilmington, and began a dialogue with school principal Maria Greene; vice principal Walter Engle; science teacher Beth Brampton and fourth-grade teacher Amanda Blakley. They chose to recycle paper.
“From the research I’d done,” Graham said, “the largest amount of recycling material that comes out of a school is paper.”
Blakely’s fourth-grade students were assigned to staff the paper recycling program. The students were separated into teams. The kick-off assembly took place in February. Since then, A-1 Sanitation has donated T-shirts for the team members, provided containers and hauls the paper away weekly to weigh it a second time.
At present, Graham is tabulating the data to see how many trees are represented by the amount of paper collected. She is also meeting with other schools in New Hanover and Brunswick counties that already have recycling programs in place and researching the possibility of grant funding to support an ongoing program.
Graham said, “First, I had to see how it operated. If a school learns to recycle one product, all you do is add another one afterward. You’ve got a system going. The goal is to be able to encourage other schools to do the same and give them options.”
Graham is considered a non-traditional student with children of her own. She<
