Since our first year as a school in 1977, planetary stewardship has been a priority. With a young group of preschoolers we began our journey of helping Planet Earth. One of the first, and most tangible, topics we initiated was the concept of reduce, reuse, and recycle. The Seed was green long before it was a movement.
Over the years we’ve recycled materials, advocated using reusable alternatives, and reused whatever we could. Many of our art projects for decades have made use of recycled materials. For example, in my years as a classroom teacher, when we had Friday projects, all kinds of devices such as video cameras, robots, and periscopes went home. One summer students made model houses strictly from recycled materials that turned into a 6-week project.
We’ve had years when we encouraged parents to be more mindful of packaging and containers sent in children’s lunchboxes. Instead of using individual throwaway ziplock bags, parents have made conscious choices to use reusable containers. We set up a seedfood website with a page filled with resources for reusable lunch containers. One year we made a graph from actual water bottles to demonstrate how many out of 100 end up in the trash instead of being recycled.
More recently the Seed has partnered with two companies to expand our recycling and composting programs. The first is with R.City, a local organization that focuses on composting and recycling of soft plastics, such as ziploc bags, paper towel packaging, grocery plastic bags, or bubble wrap. The other company is called Ridwell. It has several options, and the one we participate in is a subscription mail-in program. Each month we receive a large pre-labeled bag that we fill up with multilayer plastics (bar wrappers, bulk food packaging, produce packaging, chip bags), which we fill and then mail in.
It feels like a small amount of recycling and compositing, if you think about global needs for healing our planet. Yet, every time a family brings in their plastics, it’s one more household that is working toward making our future planet a better place for our children. The Seed is committed to keep working on this by educating children and families about ways we can be better planetary stewards.
If you want to participate, please consider bringing in your plastic packaging. You can place everything in the big blue bin by the front door, or sort out the soft plastics and place them in the box beside the blue bin. We don’t take food pouches, foil, or plastic containers. Also, the plastics need to be clean before recycling. We hope you’ll decide to participate in this program, especially the soft plastics, which are over abundant in our everyday lives. If you have any questions, please contact me at mary@awakeningseedschool.org. Help the Seed help the planet.