Earth Week Pledges

During Earth week, each student had a chance to write down a pledge - something that they would try over the next year. Their pledges are now posted in the cafeteria (thanks to the wonderful volunteers Shannon, Cindy, Ada, Margot, and Torin). What small step will you try this year?

Photos of Rieke's Earth week pledges 2011

Happy Earth Day!

This week we collected hard and soft plastics usually can't be recycled in our curbside cans. Thanks to the Rieke community, we kept 20 huge bags of plastics out of the landfills!

Photos from the plastic drive

On May 4th, the Tryon Creek Rangers will be coming to the school assembly to talk to the students and help transfer the bags to Farwest Fibers.

Waste-Free Lunch Trash Audit

On April 20th we conducted another lunch waste audit to compare the results between a 'normal' lunch day and a 'waste-free' day. The school reduced their total waste by 19% and food waste by 33%! Here are the findings:

Photos of the waste audit

	Mar 11, 2011	Apr 20, 2011	% change
plastics	6	8	+33%
milk containers	10	9	-10%
food	48	32	-33%
styrofoam	4	6	+50%
total weight	68	55	- 19%

worst offenders:

37 unused spork containers

3-4 gallons of milk poured into the waste bin (next time will we weigh the wasted milk)

several untouched bananas/oranges but greatly reduced from the apples in the last audit

International Plastic Quilt Project

How much plastic do you use a week?

The Rieke EcoThink Club collected plastics from their homes for a week and created quilt squares for the International Plastic Quilt Project. The students did a great job and their quilt will be displayed at the school for the next two weeks. It helped us get ready for our plastic recycling drive next week.

Photos of the students quilt pieces

Want to Learn More?

Ecothink Lesson 4 – Recycling and Reuse

This week we focused on Recycling and Reuse. The students created a square for the International Plastic Quilt Project and played the Garbage R’s game (recycle, reduce, reuse, reject, or rethink). Please take some time to review what your child learned during the club meeting and check out these websites with them.

Try going to ‘Recycle City’, a website from the EPA

http://www.epa.gov/recyclecity/mainmap.htm

This site has several recycling games and activities for rainy weekends or summer projects:

http://www.accesskent.com/YourGovernment/PublicWorks/pdfs/Reduce-Reuse-Recycle_Activities.pdf

Cut down on your junk mail at

http://www.catalogchoice.org

Have your child find the catalogs that you don’t want and located the customer numbers on the labels to help you opt-out of mailings.

Take the ‘Trash and Climate Change’ challenge

http://www.epa.gov/osw/education/pdfs/k00-001.pdf

Cut down on baggies use and make a sandwich wrap out of recycled items:

http://www.chicaandjo.com/2010/02/01/fused-plastic-sandwich-wraps/

Earth week is coming soon!

Rieke EcoThink Club and Tryon Creek State Park will be hosting a plastic recycling drive April 18-22. We will be accepting clean grocery bags, bread/vegetable bags, zip lock and freezer bags, bubble wrap, dry cleaning bags, clam shell/to-go containers, and plastics lids - plastics that are not accepted in the curb-side recycling bins.

Tryon Creek State Park will also be accepting more rigid plastics, media plastics, and cell phones on April 22. For more information, go to:

http://www.fotcsp.org/upload/OPRD_flyer.pdf