OLL `Green Team' aims to make recycling a habit

Our Lady of Lourdes School’s year-long theme – “Don’t Let the Chain of Love End With You” – has a special layer of meaning to the school’s fifth graders.

The “Green Team,” an after-school club open to fifth graders only and currently boasting about 30 members, has the young people actively involved in a three-pronged effort to remove items from the waste stream – and earn real cash at the same time for some very noble causes.In the first project – an AT&T endeavor called “Cell Phones for Soldiers” – the Green Team is asking OLL faculty and students to turn in their old cell phones for recycling.

“Their original plan was to collect the (cell phones) and return them for cash to fund campus beautification projects,” said Cheryl Pearse, the club’s co-moderator. “But when they learned that for each cell phone donated, AT&T would give our soldiers overseas one hour of free talk-time with their families, there was no question about where our donated phones should go,” Pearse said.

A second ongoing effort, dubbed “The Dream Machine Recycle Rally,” is a national contest co-sponsored by Waste Management and PepsiCo. in which schools can raise money for U.S. military and 9/11 first-responder veterans by collecting and recycling “PET” and PETE” plastic. The contest’s goal is to increase the nation’s beverage-container recycling percentage to 50 percent by 2018.

“By encouraging the young ones to bring in their plastic, recycling is becoming part of their culture,” Pearse said, adding that OLL also recycles aluminum. “I’m so proud of them because they are role models for the younger kids – the little ones watch them and they emulate them.”

The contest provides two pieces of equipment to help OLL keep track of its plastic donations: a scanner, which reads the bar code of every donated piece, and a laptop computer, that keeps track of the school’s running tally. Since September, OLL has recycled 29,929 plastic items – an average of 54 per student – and ranks 68th among the 482 participating schools.

Finally, through the “CC Cash Program,” the Green Team is collecting used printer ink cartridges to raise money for an ongoing beautification project: the sprucing up of the Westchester Boulevard side of OLL’s campus with new plantings and seating areas. Recently,  the club’s “landscaping angel,” OLL parent Bobby Harrison, volunteered his time to install new wooden benches and planters in the student carpool area.

“We want our outside to match the beautiful inside of our school (rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina),” said Pearse, whose ideas for the area also include a prayer grotto and butterfly garden.

Pearse created the club last year with Mehgan Hirstius, a former OLL fifth-grade teacher whose father heads up the Slidell Beautification Committee. In its first year of operation, the Green Team earned OLL the title of “Cleanest School Campus in Slidell” after completing a major litter pickup. The next pickup is scheduled for March 17, from 9-10 a.m.

“You should get all hands-on and help the earth at a young age,” said Green Team member Jaci Pearse, who believes fifth grade is the ideal time to get serious about the environment because it is in the middle of elementary school.

“It’s really, really thrilling – I just love helping the earth get cleaner,” Jaci said. “Why do people haveto treat the earth so badly?”

Brennan Maples said recycling and picking up trash has become “a natural part” of her and her parents’ day since joining the Green Club.

“This is the best club I have ever been in; you really don’t know how much damage is being done to the earth and the landfills until you start learning about it,” Brennan said. “When I see Coke cans on the side of the road, I now feel like, ‘Wow! I’m actually helping the world to become a better place, even though it’s not entirely clean yet.”