Students Make Recycling Work at Their School

At Oak Hills Elementary School in Oak Park, the crumb-filled sandwich bags, empty juice boxes and foil potato chip sacks that commonly litter playgrounds after lunch are a rare sight.

For three years, students and others at the kindergarten through fifth-grade school have been reducing trash through a “zero waste policy” put in place by Principal Anthony Knight.

“Since the day we started the program . . . we’ve gone from eight barrels of garbage per day to less than one,” Knight said.

The ambitious efforts have even drawn the attention of President Clinton.

On Friday, the last day of Earth Week, Oak Hills’ 544 students were given the President’s Environmental Youth Award by Felicia Marcus, regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s office in San Francisco.

Students also got a look at the EPA’s new “Recycle City” World Wide Web site for kids--at https://www.epa.gov--in the school’s well-stocked Macintosh lab.

Knight said students, faculty and staff have dramatically cut down on waste they throw away by encouraging students to bring lunch boxes instead of brown paper sacks, and reusable containers for snacks and fruit instead of plastic bags.

“Our cafeteria waste program is also in line with this,” Knight said. “The trays we use are made out of recycled material and are recyclable . . . we’ve cut down packaging to a minimum.”

Students also strive to recycle everything possible.

“We recycle the papers and plastic and the containers,” said fifth-grader Steve Park, who added that the lessons he has learned in school have taught him to recycle his family’s newspapers and gallon milk jugs at home.