Last Friday we had a special guest Jenny Bloom, from the Charleston Recycling Center come and talk to the kids. She started the class out by passing out used books that were sent to the recycling center from various locations throughout the county. She encouraged the kids to keep the books with them and reuse them. One must think of these books as a blank slate in which you can write your own thoughts or make art pieces with. It is simple and easy to go through the books and white out the pages in order to reuse them.
The speaker also persuaded the students to recycle. She used the example of a plastic water bottle and how you may use that water bottle one time but if you throw it away instead of recycling it, it will lay untouched in a pile of trash for 400 to 1,000 years. These waste facilities are detrimental to the environment because literally thousands of layers of trash will lay intact for hunderds of years to come.
There is also the issue of the waste energy power plant. Unlike the typical waste site, these facilities generate green electricity by burning tons of garbage which fuels homes across the country. These power plants seem like a smart idea, however much of the trash that is being burned causes irrefutable damage to the air that we breath each day.
Therefore it is imperative that we recycle whatever we can in order to make this planet more environmentally friendly. I think everyone enjoyed the lecture and hopefully it inspired many of the students to start recycling!