WEST ORANGE, NJ — One day last year, as many Golda Och Academy students often do, junior Iris Berman stayed late after school. However, this day had a much larger impact on her than she had originally anticipated.
“I saw that the cleaning crew took every single (recycling and garbage) bin and just dumped it all into the same garbage, so that was very upsetting,” Berman said. “I feel like the school (was) suggesting that it really doesn’t care about the effect that it has on the environment.”
A self-declared environmentalist who had gone so far as to take “home everyone in the class’s paper to recycle” at the GOA Lower School, Berman was horrified to discover that all of the material placed into recycling bins at GOA just ended up in the same place as the rest of the garbage. After discussing the issue with other teachers and students, including junior Noah Brown, Berman decided recently that it was time to take action on this issue.
“I had an extra locker, so Noah Brown and I transformed it into a recycling locker,” she said.
The idea of a “recycling locker” might sound foreign, but to Berman and Brown, it meant that they had “a paper bag, like what you find at the grocery store, and we’d collect paper without staples or tape” and “bottles with no caps or labels” from other students so that they could take the material home to recycle, according to Brown.
According to Berman, students have been very receptive to the recycling locker. Unbeknownst to Brown and Berman, at the same time that they were embarking on their grassroots recycling initiative, Student Council was looking for a solution in a different way. In multiple meetings with Upper School Principal Christine Stodolski and director of student life Jordan Herskowitz since January, Student Council members had voiced their concern to the administration about this issue.
Largely as a result of these meetings, the administration had quietly begun to explore a better way forward for GOA’s environmental program. On the same day that Brown explained his recycling locker, Stodolski said that a new recycling program would be enacted “within the next week” so that “what happened before hopefully won’t be happening now.”
“It has taken us a long time to get to this place,” Stodolski said. “We’ve wanted to be able to recycle for a long time in a way that’s appropriate, and it’s been confusing with many different people involved in the process, and with probably a lack of clarity around where to put things.”
Stodolski also said that many of the challenges in creating this new recycling program have been issues of communication. For example, members of the cleaning team were unaware about their responsibility to put recycled material in a separate dumpster from the trash. Sometimes, though, the material that they were given to recycle was not even recyclable because many students did not know which items belonged in which cans.
Michael Zulla, GOA’s director of facilities and operations, explained that it took a month to develop the new system, which he said was enacted in about the middle of April.
Zulla also provided documentation for this new system, which read that “Bottles and cans can be discarded at any of the GOA approved locations… (and) paper products and cardboard can be recycled using the small blue containers (found) in every room within the school.”
Before, there was no system in place to recycle cans and bottles, and despite there being a program for them, paper products were rarely recycled, both because of the cleaning team not knowing where to recycle items and students putting recyclables in the wrong bins.
Now, with this new system in place, the onus really lies on students.
“I’m going to need your (help) to make sure things get where they need to be,” Zulla said. And Zulla also said it is incumbent on students to ensure their peers know about the new recycling system and are following it.
In just one school year, the effort to create a stronger recycling program at GOA has manifested itself in a grassroots student initiative, a Student Council project, a plan by the administration and, finally, a complete new program. Now, students and faculty have the opportunity to step up and make their contribution to the environment.
This article was written by Samuel Russo, a junior at Golda Och Academy in West Orange.
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