Student Drive Serves as Food for Thought on Recycling

When students walk through a school cafeteria line to pick up their sloppy Joes, potato rounds and cartons of milk, the food is plopped onto plastic foam trays. Every school day, more than 50,000 of these trays are used--and thrown into the trash.

Students at several schools are mounting a drive to persuade officials to stop using trays made of plastic foam, which consists of chemicals that contribute to global warming. Some have written letters to the school district. A few have talked to their principals. And others have circulated petitions.

“We’re trying to help our earth,” explained Tiffany Edmiston, a seventh-grader at Will Rogers Junior High School, where 286 students signed a petition to get rid of the plastic foam trays.

Edmiston and other youngsters said they began considering recycling and other ecology measures during Earth Day, the recent worldwide celebration to encourage environmental reform.

Students at Buffum Elementary School also are circulating a petition, and students at Cubberley and Twain elementary schools have written letters to Frank Towers, head of the food services division for the Long Beach Unified School District.

Towers said he shares the students’ concerns, but there are no easy answers.

To recycle the plastic foam, Towers said he would need to hire three workers, buy three trucks and establish a central spot where the trays could be taken daily. Last summer, Towers experimented for one week with recycling trays in the city’s seven year-round schools. The district collected $500, but it cost twice that much to recycle the trays, he said.

“It’s an expensive proposition,” Towers said.

A switch to paper trays would triple the cost of trays from $350,000 to $1 million annually, and would consume more trees, Towers said.

Some students at Rogers told Principal Susan Marumoto they would be willing to wash dishes if the district turned to non-disposable plates. But that has its problems too, Towers said.

The district stopped using its school dishwashers about five years ago and many are broken. In addition to the repair costs, washing dishes in the district’s 56 elementary schools would require at least 1.7 million more gallons of water annually, at a time when many people are trying to conserve water.

“Using Styrofoam is the least expensive way for the district to go,” Towers said. “In everything in life, we have alternatives, but they have a cost.”

Towers said he will consider the options, including whether to turn to a combination of uses, such as dishwashers in schools where the machines are in good working condition and plastic foam trays in others.

Towers and a representative from the plastic foam industry visited Buffum School recently and explained the dilemma to student leaders, who were not persuaded by the arguments, Principal Bob Hedges said.

“Our children listened to them and decided to go to the petition,” Hedges said. “Their feeling is that there must be some way to do it. They say, ‘We may not know how, but someone should.’ ”

Plastic foam is inflated with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which make good coolants and good insulators. But numerous studies show that they do not break down until they are in the upper atmosphere, where chlorine molecules react with oxygen molecules and destroy the ozone that protects people from the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Earlier this year, UC San Diego officials agreed to ban plastic foam from their campus at the urging of three marine biology students. The city of Berkeley has an ordinance banning the use of all CFC-processed polystyrene by restaurants and by retail food vendors who serve takeout food.

Meanwhile, Long Beach students concerned about plastic foam also have started recycling efforts. At Buffum, for example, some students are holding newspaper drives and recycling plastic and aluminum containers. Students at Rogers and other schools have begun similar programs.

Emily Ensley, 13, one of the Rogers students heading the drive for a plastic foam ban, digs through the school’s trash cans every Thursday in search of pizza boxes, which she crushes for recycling.

The seventh-grader admits that most of her friends are not eager to join her in the effort, but she remains determined.

“I’d like to see everybody in our neighborhood start to recycle--just do something,” Ensley said. “It’s not that hard. Take a few minutes to crush a few cans or recycle some newspapers. It doesn’t take that much effort.”