The Bag it Plastic Free School contest's mission is to inspire students to reduce their own and their community’s use of single-use plastics in the form of bags, bottles, and other packaging, while participating in a fun, interactive project that will stimulate direct action and change.
Here's a message from Bag It star Jeb Berrier and Bag It baby William to inspire you to join in the fun!
Limiting plastic use at their school. Bag It! Movie Night, re-usable water bottle, student movie, Facebook page to stop people from leaving plastic around and educate people on the truth about plasticStudents in Marine Biology PBL class have been working on projects relating to ocean conservation and wildlife protection. Students have researched marine animals of their choice, taught about them to the class and made movies to show on our school television broadcast, KBIS.
The EcoChico Environmental Club at Carolina Friends School wants to encourage students and staff to reduce the use of plastic within the school and our community. We understand that all forms of plastic harm animals, the ocean, and our environment in general. We think that we can have an impact within our immediate school community and beyond. We have a number of initiatives that we are working on to achieve this goal that will be outlined below.We are hoping to reduce the amount of plastic used both at school and within our community in many ways. We want to encourage the use of reusable grocery bags, and we want to reduce the number of plastic utensils used at our school. In addition, we want to provide a way for students and parents to recycle plastic materials that are not normally collected in our community. Another goal for us is to spread awareness of the damage that plastics cause to the environment. Finally, we want to become activists by encouraging our local mayors to ban plastic grocery bags.We want to sell two hundred fifty reusable grocery bags from the Elizabeth Haub Foundation to encourage their use instead of plastic bags. We also want the school store to charge a fee for plastic utensils so that we can encourage students to bring their own utensils. We hope to promote awareness of how plastic damages the environment by showing the “Bag It” movie and follow up discussions. We also want to raise the issue of banning plastic bags or at least charging a fee for them in local grocery stores. We will use the money from our Haub bag fundraisers to purchase aluminum water bottles for each student so they will not bring plastic bottles to school. We will also continue our Terracycle program where we collect dairy containers and send them to the Terracycle company to be upcycled.We can count the number of Haub bags that we sell. We can count the number of plastic spoons that are used. We can interview people to find out what they learned from the film and if it changed their behavior in any way. Once we receive the water bottles, we can see how many students use them on a regular basis. We can count the number of yogurt containers we have sent to Terracycle.Our immediate audience is the CFS Middle School. However, we will share the film with the Upper School Environmental Club and see if they will sponsor a screening for their students. Our Terracycle program and Haub bag sales are school wide activities.1. We will sell 100 Haub bags prior to Halloween. We will advertise the sale with posters around the school and short skits presented at announcement time. We will sell the bags right next to the carpool line before and after school for three days.We sold 100 Haub bags in October. We plan to sell 150 more at the Recycling Fair in April. The Recycling Fair is an annual event where people bring their gently used children’s clothing and trade them. We charge $5 for a Haub bag and you can fill it with as many clothes as you can.
The Mill Creek High School Environmental Club created an earthbench made with plastic water bottles filled with plastic bags and Styrofoam in celebration of America Recycles Day in November 2012 at Mill Creek High School. Additionally, students organized a recycling drive, brought in an ecological educator to speak to classes about plastics pollution, hosted an afterschool screening of “Bag It,” and even developed a mobile application called Plastics Police.Plastics pollution, especially single-use plastics, is one of the greatest 21st century threats to our human and ecological health. Our society is hooked on a substance that can be used in 5 minutes, but will spend nearly forever in the landfill or as litter alongside our roadways or in our oceans. Additionally, plastics are made from non-renewable resources and when used in packaging plastics can leach chemicals into our food. Single-use plastics are the most unsustainable invention ever created, yet the easiest to solve. By educating consumers, we can make better choices the support our environment and ourselves.We consider living a life with fewer plastics the gateway drug to becoming an environmentalist. Choosing not to use disposable plastic is an easy choice that anyone can make and it doesn/'t require much of anything but a little thinking. The Mill Creek Environmental Club would like our entire school community to realize the huge plastics pollution problem we have here at Mill Creek High School and around the world.Since it takes 1,000 years for plastics to photodegrade, we challenged ourselves to involve 1,000 students in our community-wide campaign for plastics-free initiatives.We keep track of numbers by recording the number of people who participate.We look forward to securing funding to be able to build another earthbench for America Recycles Day 2013. We will keep sharing our message through our mobile application, Plastics Pollution. You can download the application by going to www.plasticspolice.org on your mobile device and adding it to your homescreen.
This is an entirely student-run project, and we are trying to lower the water bill at our school by 10%. We are solving the issue of water being unnecessarily wasted. Our desired results are for everyone in our school to understand just how important water is. We will quantify our results by speaking in assemblies, putting up posters, and just really setting an example for others.Our project was executed with a leadership team of four students at Mill Creek High School alongside some really great partners such as Greening Forward, Peace on Earthbench Movement, and Gwinnett County Parks and Recreation. We first reach out to the Peace on Earthbench Movement over the summer and began fundraising to bring a natural builder to our school for a week to show us how to build the earthbench. We then worked with the cross country team to get hundreds of plastic bottles and our Environmental Club brought in plastic bags from home that we filled the plastic bottle with. Then, on the week of America Recycles Day we built the foundation to the earthbench and celebrated America Recycles Day (November 15, 2012) with school-wide presentations and a viewing of Bag It.
We aim to change Boulder from a disposable society into a sustainable society by addressing plastic pollution, a central and visible aspect of today’s disposable culture. Our focus is to move Boulder to ban single-use grocery bags to lessen our impact on the waste stream and raise environmental awareness in our community. Though we are working toward a ban, we agree with the Boulder City Council that it is necessary to first implement the newly passed fee/fee bag ordinance (which our efforts directly led to) so that the city residents will have an incentive to change their behavior.We will address the ignorance and apathy towards the environment in the majority of Boulder’s citizens. People are unaware of the environmental consequences of habitual behaviors like single-use grocery bags, and this lack of environmental awareness is behind most problems facing the world today, especially plastic pollution. Many of these bags end up in the ocean, where they photodegrade and damage marine ecosystems. They also end up in our food, harming our bodies. Our project targets these plastic bags to reduce their environmental effects and help to illuminate the environmental impacts of everyday behavior to people in our city.The primary goal of our project is to help our community realize its environmental impact by instigating a ban on plastic and paper bags. After we lobbied city council for 18 months to address plastic pollution by passing an ordinance to reduce plastic bag use. They passed a 10 cent fee on plastic and paper bags because of our efforts. People will be discouraged from using these bags; and the fee is a transition for Boulder so the public can progress and prepare for future changes. Our goal in doing this is to raise environmental awareness while addressing plastic pollution.In advocating for this plastic and paper bag ordinance, our primary goal is to encourage more sustainable behaviors within the Boulder community. We hope that the rest of the United States will then follow Boulder’s example, and ultimately adopt a more sustainable mindset. Our desired results, although they include the reduction of our plastic waste, mainly concern the shift in consumer behavior towards more environmentally conscious actions.First of all, our work has already resulted in Boulder passing a law to limit plastic and paper bag use. After our efforts to promote this change, which include extensive research on the effects of bag ordinances nationwide, Letters to the Editor to the Boulder Daily Camera, lobbying for action at Boulder City Council meetings, and bag booths held at the Colorado Oceans Symposium, the city finally enacted an ordinance placing a fee/fee on plastic/paper bags on November 15, 2012. This ordinance goes into effect July of 2013 in 45 food retailer stores citywide. According to the nexus study issued by Boulder City Council, the projected average reduction of single-use bags is 74% (approximately 10.2 million single-use bags) over a four-year period. Since our primary goal is to raise awareness concerning plastic bags in Boulder, we want to quantify the direct effects on the population. Though it is difficult to measure the awareness of Boulder’s people, the bag ordinance is expected to reduce bag use per capita in the city which will indicate a behavioral shift away from the disposable mindset of using single-use items.Our target audience is the city of Boulder, Colorado, but we hope that, by making Boulder an example and putting it at the forefront of the bag movement, our audience will spread to ultimately encompass the United States.Since the spring of 2011, the single-use bag campaign has been the primary focus of our club. We started by conducting extensive research on single-use plastic bag ordinances not only in the U.S. but in other countries including China and Ireland. Consequently, we decided to take action first by encouraging Boulder policymakers to implement an ordinance on the usage of plastic/paper bags. In addition to our attendance at City Council meetings, we wrote Letters to the Editor to the Boulder Daily Camera in order to spread awareness of the issue. As a result of our campaign, the Fairview Net Zero Club was invited to host booths about plastic pollution at the Boulder Creek Festival and CU Boulder Ocean Symposium. Even after the passing of the fee bag ordinance in the City of Boulder, we hope to continue our efforts by ultimately achieving a total ban on both plastic and paper bags.We started our project in March 2011 by doing extensive research on the environmental effects of plastic and how other cities such as San Francisco and Seattle had effectively (or not as effectively) reduced the use of single-use grocery bags. As a club, we agreed that our eventual goal should be to change the City of Boulder’s master plan for waste reduction to include a ban on both plastic and paper grocery bags. To accomplish this goal, as we have described above, we spoke at city council for 18 months, wrote letters to the editor, and held booths at local environmental events such as the University of Colorado Ocean Symposium. These efforts successfully convinced Boulder’s City Council to enact an ordinance placing a 10 cent fee on both plastic and paper bags which will go into effect in July 2013. Our project has already impacted the entire city of Boulder (100 thousand people) and people from surrounding areas who shop at Boulder’s grocery stores. In addition to passing the ordinance on single-use grocery bags, our efforts to pass this law have increased the environmental awareness of our community. For example, at a public input meeting that our club attended, we were able to inform the audience of 50 people (who were originally split on whether or not to address the bag issue) on the environmental effects of the grocery bags and persuade them that the city needed to take action. At the end of the meeting, the city staff representative took a vote and the attendees voted nearly unanimously to address the issue of single-use grocery bag use in our city. Our numerous newspaper headlines and letters to the editor also spread awareness about this issue and the environment in general. We expect the impact on awareness and plastic pollution itself to increase once the ordinance is passed in July.
Educating pre schoolers and their community about problems related to plastic. their desired results are for everyone in our school to understand just how important water is by speaking in assemblies, putting up posters, and just really setting an example for othersOur project was executed with a leadership team of four students at Mill Creek High School alongside some really great partners such as Greening Forward, Peace on Earthbench Movement, and Gwinnett County Parks and Recreation. We first reach out to the Peace on Earthbench Movement over the summer and began fundraising to bring a natural builder to our school for a week to show us how to build the earthbench. We then worked with the cross country team to get hundreds of plastic bottles and our Environmental Club brought in plastic bags from home that we filled the plastic bottle with. Then, on the week of America Recycles Day we built the foundation to the earthbench and celebrated America Recycles Day (November 15, 2012) with school-wide presentations and a viewing of Bag It.
Green Team students have quietly worked sorting recyclables for our school’s Terracycle Brigades. The products (lids, dairy tubs, glue sticks, tape cores/dispensers, energy bar wrappers, candy wrappers, personal care products, cheese packaging and oral care products) are packaged and students get those packages to a UPS store for shipping to the recycling center. To date, their recycling efforts have resulted in over one hundred ten dollars for the Nature Conservancy. Reusing, up cycling or recycling items that cannot be recycled through our local curbside and co-mingle recycling bins. The primary goal is to raise awareness in our community about the need for all members of the school and community to realize the impact of their daily use of single-use disposables and change their habits! We would like to see an increase in our weekly intake of recycling from one bin per class to two bins per week per class. We would like to see an increase in our Terracycle brigade shipments from once every two weeks to twice a week. We would like our school to use standard lunch trays and real silverware instead of disposable styrofoam trays and plastic silverware. We will quanify our results based on the numbers listed above and additionally from the attitudes and habits and discussions had by students and staff at our school and in our community. We want to start the change but we will not stop by being the only change agents. We want to continue to grow our green team from currently 40 active members to all 530 students in our school. We would like to inspire other schools to become WA State Green Schools by following the program that we did through the Washington State Department of Ecology. Our target audience is Yakima County. We are trying to promote sustainablility and encourage all community members to be responsible citizens and think about the impact that they have as individuals in the world. We meet two days a week after school for a half hour to accomplish our mission. Students also work outside of school promoting our cause. We are starting to write letters to the community newspaper, The Yakima Herald Republic explaining our actions. We have a green team scrapbook that includes each member/'s name and picture and reasons they joined green team and their global footprint score. This project is a work in progress.. We hope to connect all our Yakima School District schools with a green team in each school. By giving students this responsiblility we are empowering them to have ownership and develop lifelong habits of earth stewardship. We are working on a chant/dance for our Green Schools Assembly when we get awarded the flag from the Department of Ecology. We have reached all members of our school community and many of their parents . Approximately 700 people. I have tried to attach a copy of our green team anthem and our letter to the editor.. but they didn/'t load right... thank you for your time and energy in putting forth this contest.
We want to encourage people to stop using single-use disposable plastic bags by educating them about the dangers of disposable plastics. We will be giving away reuseable cloth bags. We willl work with our cafiteria at our school to stop using plastic water bottles and plastic utensils and replace them with paper cups and metal utensils. We plan on giving a public viewing of the "Bag it" film at our local theatre, and having an assembly at our school to provide information and solutions to plastics in the environment. We are getting rid of plastic sporks and water bottles in our school and reducing plastic bags at stores. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. We will ask around in our community and watch for our bags throughout town. We are going to estimate the reduction of plastic sporks and bottles per day in our school. Our target audience are students and the staff at our school and our whole community. Our target audience are students and the staff at our school and our whole community. We meet once a week to plan and work on our project. We designed our logo and chose canvas bags to be printed on. We designed a flier to present to organizations to solicit funds and a pamphlet to give away in the bags. We've gotten the cafeteria to stop using plastic water bottles and are trying to get them to switch from plastic to metal silverware. We are organizing a showing of the" Bag It" film at our local theater and we will ask for donations to help support our bag giveaway project. We'll also organize a school assembly to warn our school about the dangers of plastic. We will give away our bags with fliers on weekends in front of stores that use many plastic bags. We started on Wednesday, January 16, 2013 and have met once a week since then. We talked to the printer on February 13th to begin the process of getting bags printed. Our project will continue past March 15. We have designed pamphlets, fliers and our logo and have filmed our video. We are in the process of editing our video and uploading it to Youtube. We will show "Bag It" in our local theatre. Since most of our project's impact will be in the future, we have not yet seen its final result. However, at our school we have eliminated plastic bottles in our cafeteria since January 22nd and we estimate we have reduced plastic bottles by over 5,000. By showing the "Bag It" video in the 5th and 6th grade classrooms we have had an impact on many individual students and their families. We have had several field trips following Boyle Creek learning about our water course. Along the way we have collected bags of garbage so they will not clutter our oceans. Many students bring in their own refillable water bottles. http://youtu.be/5dgd_C4q2tA
Our primary goal is to get twenty restaurants in our neighborhood to either go straw-less or switch to paper straws. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEz1vaA0sTA&feature=youtu.be sfs.jpg mcd.jpg
The Truckee High Envirolution Club has been working six long years on spreading environmental awareness through Trashion shows, classroom mentoring, and advocacy. We travel to many schools in our district to put on the Trashion shows, where our club members make outfits out of trash and other recyclable materials, which we present with informative commentary. We believe that Trashion shows are a fun and creative way to get our message out in a memorable manner. Our goal is to inspire the kids who watch our shows to make a difference in their families, making a difference in our community
We conducted a water fountain audit and a two-year grocery store study. At school, we reported broken water fountains to get them fixed so that we could decrease dependency on plastic water bottles. For the store study, we conducted visual surveys of age, gender, and bag choice of 50,400 customers exiting five local grocery stores before and after the plastic bag ban to evaluate the effectiveness of the ban. At the district and city levels, we testified at a school board meeting and at city council to promote sustainability. https://plus.google.com/photos/104551955047881037119/albums/5854238138415465569?authkey=CIK0hoGOrZ2YRg. To solve the increasing reliance on single-use plastic water bottles, we conducted two water fountain audits, reported the results to facilities, and evaluated the repairs through our second audit. We are thus trying to increase the access to free, clean drinking water. With our bag ban surveys, we sought to use science to discredit claims from pro-plastic groups stating that bag bans aren’t effective and would only increase dependency on paper bags. We proved them wrong. The first goal was to collect quantitative data on the working conditions of water fountains to show how many were defective and broken. Our second goal was to collect quantitative data on patrons’ bag choice at grocery stores to evaluate the effectiveness of the city’s plastic bag ban in terms of increasing reusable bags and decreasing plastic and paper bags. The reason for this was to prove the pro-plastic groups wrong using science. We also wanted this research to support cities and states in pursuing bag bans. By showing school administration and maintenance in the first water fountain audit that 80% of our water fountains were broken or defective we were trying to get the school to fix the water fountains. We did this to encourage people to drink free clean water instead of buying bottled water. Our desired result for the second water fountain audit was to double check that they were fixed after maintenance crews were seen on campus. For the bag ban research, our desired result was to show that bag bans work in decreasing plastic and paper bag usage and increase reusable bags, so that we could give out scientific data that would support bans in other cities and states. For our water fountain audits, we developed and used a data sheet to classify the water fountains with the following codes: W (Working), B (Broken), O (Overflow), L (Low Flow), LP (Low Pressure), and D (Dirty/Debris). We then tallied the number of water fountains in different categories and then took percentages. Similarly, for our bag ban research we used a survey sheet to determine how many patrons exiting grocery stores before and after the ban were using different bag types (plastic, reusable, paper, or no bag) as well as their age and gender. For both studies, we used spreadsheets to compile the data and generate graphs. For the bag research in particular, we graphed the mean percentages with error bars, specifically standard error bars to determine the precision of the data. Most recently, we started working with a UCLA statistics professor to perform rigorous statistical analyses. For our water fountain audits, we developed and used a data sheet to classify the water fountains with the following codes: W (Working), B (Broken), O (Overflow), L (Low Flow), LP (Low Pressure), and D (Dirty/Debris). We then tallied the number of water fountains in different categories and then took percentages. Similarly, for our bag ban research we used a survey sheet to determine how many patrons exiting grocery stores before and after the ban were using different bag types (plastic, reusable, paper, or no bag) as well as their age and gender. For both studies, we used spreadsheets to compile the data and generate graphs. For the bag research in particular, we graphed the mean percentages with error bars, specifically standard error bars to determine the precision of the data. Most recently, we started working with a UCLA statistics professor to perform rigorous statistical analyses. For our water fountain audits, we developed and used a data sheet to classify the water fountains with the following codes: W (Working), B (Broken), O (Overflow), L (Low Flow), LP (Low Pressure), and D (Dirty/Debris). We then tallied the number of water fountains in different categories and then took percentages. Similarly, for our bag ban research we used a survey sheet to determine how many patrons exiting grocery stores before and after the ban were using different bag types (plastic, reusable, paper, or no bag) as well as their age and gender. For both studies, we used spreadsheets to compile the data and generate graphs. For the bag research in particular, we graphed the mean percentages with error bars, specifically standard error bars to determine the precision of the data. Most recently, we started working with a UCLA statistics professor to perform rigorous statistical analyses. We reached out to our school officials in conducting our water fountain audit, to get their help in fixing the water fountains. Because the school has made limited progress in the past few months according to our second water fountain audit, our next audience would be community members, fellow peers, and parents. For our bag ban research, we reached out to our city officials including giving a PowerPoint presentation to members of the city’s Task Force on the Environment as well as members of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment. Our next audiences will be informed through our press release. They include over 1,000 people involved in nonprofit organizations, news media, science, government, the school board, and hundreds of students, parents, and teachers. Furthermore, our bag ban research will be used to aid us in our testimony for bag bans in other municipalities. Above all, we hope our results get seen by the state legislatures, so that they can enact statewide bag bans, which might one day lead to a federal bag ban. For our bag ban research, we started with the individual observations at grocery stores and compiled them in an excel document. With all the observations completed, we added up totals and calculated mean percentages for each variable - age, gender and bag choice. We also separated stores into eco-friendly stores (ones that used little or no plastic before the ban) and regular stores (ones that used predominantly plastic before the ban) and generated summary graphs, time graphs (19 months of data over 2 year study), age graphs and gender graphs for both pre-ban and post-ban time periods. Now that the graphical analyses are done, we will present our results at the LA County Science Fair, send out a press release to the greater community and pursue publication in a scientific journal, and provide testimony to the city, state and federal governments. For the water fountain audit, we first observed all 68 water fountains on our school campus categorizing them into the following codes: W (Working), B (Broken), O (Overflow), L (Low Flow), LP (Low Pressure), and D (Dirty/Debris). We next put the data into an excel spreadsheet and calculated the percentage of how many fountains were broken, defective or had no issues. We then made graphs and sent out a report to our school and district (see attached Water Fountain Audit Research Reports). For our bag ban research, we started with the individual observations at grocery stores and compiled them in an excel document. With all the observations completed, we added up totals and calculated mean percentages for each variable - age, gender and bag choice. We also separated stores into eco-friendly stores (ones that used little or no plastic before the ban) and regular stores (ones that used predominantly plastic before the ban) and generated summary graphs, time graphs (19 months of data over 2 year study), age graphs and gender graphs for both pre-ban and post-ban time periods. Now that the graphical analyses are done, we will present our results at the LA County Science Fair, send out a press release to the greater community and pursue publication in a scientific journal, and provide testimony to the city, state and federal governments. For the water fountain audit, we first observed all 68 water fountains on our school campus categorizing them into the following codes: W (Working), B (Broken), O (Overflow), L (Low Flow), LP (Low Pressure), and D (Dirty/Debris). We next put the data into an excel spreadsheet and calculated the percentage of how many fountains were broken, defective or had no issues. We then made graphs and sent out a report to our school and district (see attached Water Fountain Audit Research Reports).
We collected plastic bags from our homes, our neighborhoods, the trunks of our cars, and the streets around school. We made fun posters and put them on storage bins and announced our collection contest at morning assembly. After 6 weeks, we presented the bags to The People’s Movement, a local business who will “upcycle” the bags into sneakers and wallets.We are ridding the landfills and oceans of these plastic bags while at the same time finding a second life for them. We are increasing awareness about single use plastic bags and saving resources that would normally go into making regular sneakers and wallets.To bring awareness to our students of the wastefulness of single use plastic bags and rid our surrounding environment of them. As they stack up in storage bins on the playground, they will become a conversation piece and a constant reminder of the ugliness, wastefulness and folly of single use plastic.We hope to get 100% participation and fill 4 bins.Each class has student council reps and we have asked them to report back to their classroom weekly, reminding the kids to keep bringing in plastic bags. We will also count the # of bags in one bin and estimate how many bags are in the others.Though our Upcycle project ended on March 8th, we have started another collection: plastic bottle caps. We learned from the film that these cannot be recycled. This collection will continue through May, culminating at our annual carnival, Canyon Fiesta. During Fiesta, some of our art teachers will work with students to turn the bottle caps into a sculpture that will live on and remind us to reduce our use of plastic. Fiesta is attended by over 600 people. This year, we are ordering aluminum cans of water from a non-profit company cannedwater4kids. They provide high quality, filtered glacier drinking water in high design aluminum cans. They are made from over 60% recycled materials and are a nice alternative to plastic bottled water. Next year, our goal is to do away with all outside water and have everyone bring their own Canyon logo stainless steel water bottles!
Fashion for the Future Plastic Fashion is your everyday clothing but made of plastic.So far we\'ve made aprons for cooking, Ballet dresses, a valentines day outfit, and regular business suits.
Ban the Bag Conference This Conference was the first of its kind in NYC, and it was run by students!
Our project involves gathering bottles of water from trash cans and recycling bins outside of our schools after school each day of the week and compiling them into a water bottle "mountain" in the front entrance of our school. Around the mountain, signs will be hanging with statistics on national and global consumption of water bottles as well as the rising number of water bottles in the mountain. As the week goes on, the mountain will get bigger and bigger, proving our point more and more.Plastic bottle use is such an interesting problem because we can easily switch to reusable bottles, but people do not realize how much we are consuming. We want people to make more conscious decisions when deciding what to buy, or drink, or eat. We may be campaigning specifically against plastic water bottles, but it stands for more.The goal of our project is to expose people to how much we are actually consuming on a regular basis and teaching them that there is a sustainable alternative. The most effective way of swaying the people and changing their habits is to give them a startling visual that makes them think more about what they are doing, which is what we plan to do.Hopefully people will see that we consume an exorbitant amount of plastic bottles and they will stop purchasing them from the cafeteria at our school. Our food service provider refuses now to get rid of plastic bottles because they bring in so much revenue for the school, but if people boycotted the purchasing of these plastics, the food service would no longer have a motive for selling them.We will quantify our results by keeping track of how many water bottles we collect throughout the week so that we can see how many.Our target audience is everyone in the school. We have strategically planned for the display to be situated in the front entrance to school, so that everyone will see it walking past, and thus be unable to not face the facts. Students are the biggest culprits of using plastic water bottles, but teachers as well. We also hope that athletes especially will take the display into consideration and use reusable bottles for their practices and games.Our step-by-step plan is to first find five or so persuasive statistics about plastic bottle consumption and put them onto signs to hang around the mountain. After finishing those, we will begin the actual project on a Monday afternoon, and collect all the bottles from garbage receptacles on our school campus. We will then arrange these bottles into the mountain. We will continue doing this after school everyday for a week, and watch the mountain grow.So far, we have only completed the signs for the project. The week of April 1st, we have permission to start collecting and assembling the mountain. That week will be the week that the display goes up. We have teams for both collecting and assembling, as well as for arranging the signs to hang down from the ceiling. We will use a volume comparison for how many bottles we have collected using a wing of our school that all students and faculty know.
The YAC works to stop the use of polystyrene (aka styrofoam) in their school and community. YAC is addressing the health and environmental impacts of polystyrene foodservice-ware. In the DC area, plastic waste is a huge problem (contributing 85% of the trash in the Anacostia River). Efforts to address problems of plastic trash are timely for our region and surrounding jurisdictions. The primary goal of the Young Activist No Polystyrene Campaign is to replace polystyrene lunch trays at the Piney Branch Elementary School in Takoma Park, MD with durable trays and a dishwasher, and to raise awareness in the wider community about the negative environmental and public health impacts of polystyrene in food service ware. The desired results of the No Polystyrene Campaign are to: * Build broad support for replacing polystyrene through research, education, community activities and online presence including social media and website development; * Pressure the school board and the Montgomery County Public Schools administrator to allow a pilot program to proceed; * Secure the commitment of local PTAs to go polystyrene-free for PTA-sponsored events; * Reach out to the Takoma Park community to implement and educate the community on the city's two new resolutions favoring phase out of polystyrene foodservice-ware; * Secure the commitment of 50 new businesses to pledge to go polystyrene-free (28 have already signed the pledge); * Expand the City of Takoma Park’s polystyrene restriction to public festivals (specifically the popular Folk Festival and Street Festival) and to all restaurants; * Petition and meet with the FDA and EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection to garner commitments to address the health implications on children of using polystyrene as a foodservice ware material; * Seek to have the City of Takoma Park's polystyrene resolution replicated in the region; and, * Share our success and the lessons learned with other students and schools by the sharing of this educ Success of this project can be evaluated by achievement of the following target results: * Through a grassroots campaign, achieve strong student, PTA, and School Board support for our pilot project to test durable lunch tray washing over the current disposable system. * Permission from the school superintendent to install a dishwasher at Piney Branch Elementary School, followed by its purchase and installation and the start of monitoring all costs associated with the pilot. * Raising awareness of polystyrene’s health and environmental impacts among the Takoma Park, MD and wider community through, for instance, the dissemination of at least 1,000 bookmarks. * At least 50 new businesses commit to going polystyrene-free and post “Polystyrene-Free” stickers in their windows. * At least 5 more PTAs pledge to go polystyrene-free. * At least 2 more local jurisdictions restrict use of city funds to purchase polystyrene for foodservice ware. * Takoma Park City Council passes a new resolution banning use of polystyrene at public events and at local restaurants. National process and program. The Young Activist Club is a community project that impacts not only our youth but also the 17,300 residents of Takoma Park, MD, as well as the wider public school district in Montgomery County, made up of 200 schools and 142,000 students. Residents of the District of Columbia also stand to benefit as the project seeks to be a model that can be replicated elsewhere – not only a model for replacing harmful polystyrene lunch trays but perhaps more importantly, a model for active youth participation in the political process. The Young Activist Club is working in three core areas this year: 1. Schools 2. Businesses 3. Policy SCHOOL CAMPAIGN: Piney Branch ES Dishwasher Pilot Project: Pilot testing washable lunch trays in place of disposable styrofoam trays. We have raised $10,000 already for this project and are working to secure the go-ahead from the school superintendent. To this end, we have started an online petition directed at Superintendent Dr. Starr. PTA Polystyrene-Free Pledges: Advocating that PTAs adopt a policy to avoid polystyrene at all PTA events. Students are directly getting on the agenda at local PTA meetings and making presentations. BUSINESS CAMPAIGN: We are asking businesses to sign our pledge to go polystyrene free. After businesses sign the pledge, they get a sticker to display on their window and we will deliver a stack of our educational bookmarks to further help raise awareness. Activists are asking for meetings with local business associations and directly visiting businesses. POLICY: Our policy activities include: * Identifying model policies in place elsewhere. All of this work is taking place during the school year, which does extend past March 15th. We expect to have permission to install the dishwasher in time for the beginning of the 2013-14 school year. We also plan to have the PTA pledges in place by then as well. The No Polystyrene-Free Business Pledge Campaign is ongoing throughout the year. The students recently launched an online form of the pledge and expect to garner more participation via this route. The request to the City Council to restrict polystyrene at public events and at all restaurants was made in February. The students will be talking directly to business associations and local businesses to support the stronger policy in the coming months. For a detailed chronology of the Young Activist Club’s No-Polystyrene Campaign, please visit our History web page at: http://youngactivistclub.org/about-us/history/. This school year the Young Activist Club focused primarily on its No Polystyrene Business Pledge Campaign, in which the young activists met with and asked Takoma Park-based businesses to sign a pledge committing to not use polystyrene for food service ware. We aimed to engage at least 5 middle schoolers, secure pledges from 25 businesses to go polystyrene free, produce at least one video, create a new website that would serve as a clearinghouse for information on the problems with polystyrene and how communities are addressing these problems, and raise awareness among the community about the dangers of polystyrene use through dissemination of 2,000 bookmarks. By these measures, we reached our desired goal for 2012. We have 8 middle school members, secured pledges from 28 businesses to go polystyrene-free, produced one documentary on the Club, and have disseminated hundreds of bookmarks. We also launched a new website - http://youngactivistclub.org/ In addition, we convinced Montgomery County to pass a resolution encouraging elimination of polystyrene for foodservice ware in County cafeterias, have been featured on the front page of the Washington Post’s Metro section (http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-08/local/35701405_1_foam-trays-polystyrene-foodcontainers-david-binkle), and invited to include our campaign on the website of Trashed, the new movie featuring Jeremy Irons. We estimate that our work has reached tens of thousands of people in the Washington Post readership area. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NgOyWMFZ6M
We are going to speak to the head and assistant head of school, the student body, the parents, and the board of trustees about banning plastic single-use bottles on campus. Reducing the need for bottled water. Reduce the overall amount of plastic used by the students. Starting next school year, in September, students will no longer be allowed to bring water bottles to school. Checking the recycle bins each week. Our student body. First convince head and assistant head of school - first week in April. After informing the school community (see above) we will ask people to make the shift the rest of the school year. In September, we will no longer allow the bottles on campus. Not yet.
essays on Plastic vs. Reusable Bags
First, we will collect cardboard boxes and cut them into game boards. Then we will color the game boards and make spaces for the checkers. Then we will collect bottlecaps from the playground, from around school, and from our community. Then we will wash the bottlecaps and sort the caps into different colors and make sets of checkers. We will give these out to everybody we know and ask them to share with everyone they know.
We made a 3D poster from reused plastic containers and plastic materials that we found in our community. In our project, we are displaying turtles that are getting stuck in plastic bags and getting ensnared in nets from careless people who don\'t know what they\'re doing and how it affects the environment. We also put facts about marine animals that are hurt by plastic in the ocean to raise awareness about plastic pollution in our oceans
"If Can, Can...If No Can, Reuse! Be Plastic Free Hawaii!"
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