Register for the K-12 Recycling Challenge!
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Children are the seeds of change. Keep California Beautiful is working with California’s Schools to put on the second annual K-12 Recycling Challenge with agoal “ to generate enthusiasm for recycling and promote a healthy competition between schools and recycling coordinators.” This friendly competition is open to all K-12 schools in California, and has $16,000 in cash awards available for winning schools.
Although climate change has become major conversation topic in our daily lives over the past decade, Americans continue to engage in wasteful day-to-day behavior at an alarming rate. For instance, 3 billion California Refund Value (CRV) eligible containers found their way to landfills in 2013. With each container valued at either 5 or 10 cents, that ends up being more than $100 million worth of unclaimed CRV money, not to mention an egregious amount of unnecessary waste. Of those 3 billion containers, each plastic bottle will take 700 years to decompose, while each glass bottle will take 1 million years. Clearly, we can’t afford to keep wasting at this rate.
PaperSeed is proud to sponsor the K-12 Recycling Challenge for a second year. In 2015, 63,073 students and staff across 80 schools participated and, as a result of last year’s efforts, 424,555 pounds of recyclables were collected and diverted from landfill. Ray Scott, the K-12 Recycling Challenge Project Leader, was awarded the California Resource Recovery Association’s award for Recycling Program of the Year in 2015. However, with over 6,531,000 teachers, staff, and students in California’s schools, the Recycling Challenge is just getting started, and Scott hopes to take the competition nationwide over the next few years.
Registration is free, participation is easy, and the time to affect climate change is now. We hope you’ll join us in spreading the word and helping us get the message out to every California school.