How To Make Our School More Eco-Friendly

1. How To Make Our School More Eco-Friendly Virginia Cornell 20 April 2009

2. Knowledge & Awareness • The first thing you need to know in order to help our school become more eco-friendly is what eco-friendly means and you have to be aware of how things affect the earth.

3. Recycle • Obviously we should recycle. Each classroom should have a bucket/can specifically for recyclable products, and if not, then we need them.

4. Recycling Facts • To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down. (http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html) • If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year! (http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html) • Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator. (http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html) • How long it takes for things to break down: Paper- 2.5 months; Orange Peel- 6 months; Milk Carton- 5 years; Cigarette Butt- 10-12 years; Plastic bag- 10-20 years; Disposable diaper- 75 years; Tin can- 100 years; Beer can- 200-500 years; Styrofoam- never (immortal) (http://www.thatdanny.com/2008/06/06/how-long-does-it-take-a-plastic-bag-or-a-glass-bottle-to-decompose/)

5. No More Styrofoam • Styrofoam lunch trays should be replaced by trays made from biodegradable products, or trays that can be washed and used again. • Also, Styrofoam bowls should be done away with and replaced by paper or plastic bowls. Anything but Styrofoam.

6. Facts about Styrofoam • *It is un-recyclable—you can't make it into new Styrofoam. The industry wants you to assume it is- don't BUY it! (http://www.oberlin.edu/recycle/facts.html) • *Each year American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups, enough every year to circle the earth 436 times. (http://www.oberlin.edu/recycle/facts.html) • The styrofoam cups Americans use each year could form a chain that would circle the Earth 436 times. National Toxics Campaign (http://www.uoregon.edu/~recycle/Factoids_earth_facts.htm).

7. Save Energy—Lower Electric Bill • These rules apply to school and at home: Turn off the lights when not needed. If the sun is shining brightly through the windows, turn the lights off, unless you absolutely need so much light. And replace standard light bulbs with CFL light bulbs—Eco-Friendly light bulbs. • And turn off the monitors on the computers when they are not in use. Off!

8. Less Paper • Moderate the amount of paper used. • Use the back of an old worksheet as scrap paper for math problems. • Use the front and back of a piece of paper when writing. -And don’t forget to recycle your paper when it’s not needed anymore!

9. Paper Facts! • Recycling 1 ton of paper saves about 17 trees (http://paperproject.org/paperfacts.html). • Today, more than 95 percent of paper is made from wood cellulose (http://paperproject.org/paperfacts.html). • Recycling paper uses 60% less energy than manufacturing paper from virgin timber (http://www.purdue.edu/envirosoft/housewaste/src/paper.htm).

10. Plant a Tree! • A few students from each pod should each plant a tree for the school. • And a select few classes should plant trees in empty lots—with permission from the government or whoever is in control of what goes on with the lot, of course.

11. Facts about Trees • The shade and wind buffering provided by trees reduces annual heating and cooling costs by 2.1 billion dollars (http://www.savatree.com/tree-facts.html). • A single tree produces approximately 260 pounds of oxygen per year. That means two mature trees can supply enough oxygen annually to support a family of four (http://www.savatree.com/tree-facts.html)! • The death of one 70-year old tree would return over three tons of carbon to the atmosphere (http://www.treesaregood.com/funfacts/General.aspx).

12. Learn & Teach Even More • Teach others about how to be eco-friendly. • We could visit the elementary schools and tell the kids about recycling and saving energy. • We can research about global warming and ways to become even more eco-friendly (Awareness, 1st Slide) • As said in the first slide, the first step to helping our school become more eco-friendly is to know things.