Toronto Schools Get Serious About Garbage
On a recent Wednesday, a group of students at St. Henry Catholic School had a problem.
They were sweeping up the detritus of the day, and had nowhere to deposit their pile — a popped balloon, a broken pencil, and an orange peel.
Wednesdays are wasteless at the school near Highway 404 and Steeles Ave. Students and staff bring lunch in reusable containers, choose foods without packaging, and the garbage cans are tucked out of sight.
Since they take the zero-waste challenge seriously, the students each volunteered to take a piece of the trash home. While a burst balloon is not your traditional take-home project (and it still wound up in somebody else’s trash), it’s all about the conversation: changing small habits and hoping the lessons learned in an elementary school will spread into the community.
“It’s not that difficult, we have Tupperware and stuff,” Grade 6 student Sheena Yadao says of the weekly challenge. On trips to the grocery store, Yadao’s family looks for food with less packaging, since “reduce is the number one R,” she says.
Benjamin George, also in Grade 6, lives in an apartment, like many of his classmates.
“We don’t have green bins. Even if I take it home, I put it in the garbage. Of course I take it home because Wastefree Wednesday is absolutely no garbage,” he says.
Although the school has been a Certified Eco School for nearly five years, the latest push happened this February, when a man walked into Janice Rego’s Grade 5/6 class and started sifting through the trash. It was Principal Roy Fernandes.
“Snacks are what’s killing us,” says the energetic young principal, who has brought an environmental message to every school where he has worked.
Mrs. Rego’s class started doing research. They looked at how snacks were packaged, and invited corporations and environmental groups into their class to hear both sides of the story.
The students wrote to companies. They experimented and, after a somewhat stale snack in March, learned that the plastic bag that surrounds microwave popcorn isn’t as useless as they thought.
“That was a great lesson — OK, we get it, some packaging, it has to happen,” Fernandes said.
At an “environmental extravaganza” Friday, Mrs. Rego’s class performed a play written by Fernandes and some of his students back in 2002, when he was a teacher.
An announcer, played by Alex Wang, introduced all the characters with pithy lines. For example: “She’s powerful. She’s friendly. She doesn’t seem to want to get involved in this issue. She’s the government!”
(Fear not, disheartened bureaucrats. By the end of the play, the “government” had learned some lessons, had started charging an environmental tax on poorly packaged products and changed all Ontario cities to three-stream waste management systems.)
At the end of the assembly, Fernandes gave an impassioned speech to an increasingly squirming and recess-ready audience that touched on reusable milk containers and the uselessness of gasoline receipts
“I don’t know many people who have to go refund their gas. Maybe you’re keeping them for income-tax purposes, then no problem, put it on your credit card, your debit, it will show up,” he said.
The adults in the crowd laughed, but the tax reference went over the heads of the two girls playing patty-cake in the middle of the gym floor.
“At our school for the next five days, there are no garbage bags. What are you going to do if you’re me and every day on bus duty you have your apple core, what will you do?”
After the assembly, Fernandes said he told Mrs. Rego’s class they can put the cores underneath a tree because they will decompose. (As a school-wide initiative, apple-core mountains in the schoolyard aren’t ideal, he says.)
But waste is down. There is talk of a smaller dumpster. Maybe if the city brings the green-bin program into schools (and the city confirmed they’re working on those details) they’ll have a place for all those apples.
Summary: The schools in the greater Toronto area have been trying for the past years to become more environmentally friendly. More specifically st. Henry catholic school near the highway 404. They started doing no waste Wednesdays to reduce the green foot print. The number of schools doing this in the greater Toronto area have increased rapidly. They also got the students interacting with the food companies emailing them a letter to see their ecological foot print for a school research project.
Opinion: The Candian government already packs a lard amount of some useless and some non useless information into our school curriculum. With the grade 5 and 6 students learning more than they need to know I think is counter productive. They mentioned that some students are interested in conserving their foot print and the environmental. Well at the age of 10 in grade 6 how should students know what they are interested in and what there not interested in it probably changed every day. At a young age is when your brain is the most fully functioning and when you should pack all of the important information into their head, not fill them with useless information that will not benefit them into the future.
Friday, April 27 2012
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