Earth Week at Willis Lane

By:

During Earth Week at Willis Lane we challenged our students, staff, and parents to reduce their environmental impact and to become environmental stewards. The week's events included a Reduce-Reuse-Recycle campaign; a Reduce Your Waste Challenge; and an e-waste recycling day.

In order to encourage students to reduce, reuse, and recycle, we created a wall in the cafeteria to show our students how the three R’s can be put into practice at lunchtime.  

We also promoted a Reduce Your Waste Challenge where students were challenged to reduce their waste three different ways throughout the week. In addition to making students aware of the challenge through morning announcements, we also sent home flyers which included the following information:

In honor of Earth Week, our school will participate in a Reduce Your Waste Challenge to help educate students about their environmental impact & encourage support of a sustainable
environment through reduction, reuse, & recycling.

With your help, here are 3 ways we hope to challenge our students to reduce their waste &
instill environmentally friendly habits for the coming years:

1. Waste Free Lunch & Snack Week: Students are challenged to bring their drinks, snacks, & home packed lunches to school in waste-free, reusable containers. Bringing food in reusable bags, boxes, & bottles will eliminate significant container waste from our lunchtime routine. 

2. Use It Again: We challenge our students to reuse an item, any item, at least 3 times during Earth Week. From water bottles to plastic bags (or even something as simple as a piece of paper), if we reuse an item, we can make a difference & reduce the amount of waste produced at our school.

3. Eliminate Food Waste: Our students are challenged to only bring or buy what can be eaten during lunchtime. Our school creates several hundred pounds of waste each week, most of it uneaten food & half empty (or even full) cartons of milk. With everyone’s participation, our school will reduce its lunchtime waste by a few hundred pounds this week alone!

Finally, due to the success of the first e-waste recycling day held during our Willis Lane Recycles Week, we decided to offer another e-waste collection day during Earth Week. Parents and teachers were asked to bring their old computers, monitors, keyboards, appliances, batteries, etc. to be responsibly recycled through a local company called DFW Reclaimers, Inc. We included information about the e-waste drop collection on the Reduce Your Waste Challenge flyer and posted signs at the school on the day of the event to remind parents and teachers about the collection.