Features

Cover to Cover: Schools promote recycling

Gay Riggs, Monocacy Elementary School’s building services manager, acts as the driver, pushing a large white bucket on wheels throughout the hallways. Students walk beside her as she gives each a room assignment—111, 112, 114. Then the students scatter into the classrooms, appearing with containers of recyclable trash, which they dump into the large bucket.

This scene is repeated every morning at Monocacy, as the school’s esteemed Green Team works to promote recycling success. “To be on the Green Team that rolls is really an honor,” Riggs says. “The children love it. Like the patrol positions, they’re doing a good service.” 

Monocacy is only one of the schools and offices making a difference in the school system’s recycling effort. “Our focus right now is getting everyone in the MCPS community participating in the recycling program 100 percent of the time,” says Lynne Zarate, MCPS environmental safety coordinator. “If we could get everyone recycling all of their office paper, we would be very close to reaching our goal.”

Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School also has taken that message to heart, improving its recycling performance grade from an “F” to an “A” in 2008 by adding more recycling bins in main hallways along with signs telling students and staff how to recycle properly.

Visit a typical trash room in MCPS and you’ll see discarded office paper wrappers, sheets of paper, boxes and more that could have been recycled. (One ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees.) Or take those bottles and cans mixed in with the regular trash. (It only takes three to five plastic bottles to make a T-shirt.) 

What can staff do to help? Spread the word, encourage students and make sure your school or office has enough recycling cans and lids. To learn more, view the September “Cover to Cover” on MCPS Cable Channel 34. 

Cover to Cover for September and October contains four segments:

• Behind The Scenes—Summer operations; staff prepares for a new school year
• Class Act—MCPS recycling initiatives
• In Focus—The Division of Family and Community Partnerships
• Inside Look—A video celebration of the first day of school

Watch Cover to Cover (real 26m 35s)

Cover to Cover web page