South goes green with the recycling program
Used with permission from Jonathen Arant
After a long day of work students drop their collecting in the bin out back.
October 22, 2019
The recycling program at South Forsyth High School has been around for 10 years, cleaning the school’s environment and providing an enriching activity for the school’s autism classes. This program focuses on encouraging students and staff to recycle.
The recycling service for the school provides blue trash bins to any teacher willing to participate, and they collect the bins once every week. The importance of this organization is helping the Moderately Intellectually Disabled and Modified Curriculum Autism classes use their social skills and become an outlet for change in our society. The hope of the program is to increase the amount of people who recycle in the school and in the community.
Once they collect the bins, the students have the opportunity to either take the recycled items to the bin behind the school or go visit The Forsyth Recycling Center and work with the people there.
Helping hands. Students at South are going around the school to collect all the recycling bins for the week. Once they have collected all the recyclables, they students send it to the county recycling center.
“Students traveled to the recycling center, where they saw how the items they collected were re-purposed,” says Johnathen Arant, a South Educator of Exceptional Students in Peer Facilitation program.
The act of recycling at South benefits both the school and the county. The Forsyth County Recycling Center uses the single stream system. When their recycling goods come into the plant, they separate the plastic, paper, and cardboard. Single stream is taking over the U.S by helping the recycling companies get the recycled goods through the system faster. This allows the Forsyth County Recycling Center to give the students at South an estimate of how many items they collected.
In the past year, students recycled over 8,000 plastic bottles. Recycling plastic bottles is benefiting the community by powering more energy and removing possible hazards from the environment. South isn’t able to keep up with the amount of things they recycle because of the county switching to single stream systems, but they can make a rough estimate. “The energy saved by recycling one plastic bottle can power a computer/iPad for twenty five minutes,” mentions Mr. Arant in his interview.
All in all, the South Forsyth High School recycling program has helped our school and community environment be cleaner for all of us. Students and teachers alike contribute to this program by helping better our environment and lessening our carbon footprint in our community.
