GFA Implements a New Recycling System
Jack Pegler ‘24, Owen Jacobson, ‘24
Just recently, the GFA sustainability team changed the system for waste management, recycling and composting for lunch. This new system has had a mixed reaction and launch among all 3 divisions.
“It seemed like the timing was right this year,” Middle School Science Teacher and member of the sustainability team, Julia Roellke said.
The new system launched with the new year, with a school wide email sent on January 5th educating everyone about the new way of doing things. Later in the week, a video was aired in Upper School advisories which instructed students on where certain items would go.
“With any new routine it takes an army of folks to be on board for the new routines and practices. So we’ve relied pretty heavily on ECO Club and Green Team to help be little educators and communicate what these new routines are. We’ve also relied a lot on class meetings [and] advisory time in middle school to help with some educational programming,” Roellke said.
As well as the sustainability team at GFA, many of the student run clubs are working hard to educate the entire school about the new system, with posters and friendly reminders throughout the day. They have also worked hard to spread composting, trash, and recycling stations throughout school.
“This [change] was very student driven,” Upper School Science Teacher and Sustainability Coordinator Dr. Heather Heenehan said. “The Advancement team created a video that went to the whole school with a dragon showing what waste goes where.”
As everyone knows, this has been an extremely unusual year, and there wouldn’t be a change to school in some way without its own set of separate difficulties and problems.
“Because of the new lunch situation with COVID and the spreading out of where people are eating, the different types of packages and containers lunch is coming in that we’re not used to, we wanted to make sure that we had the stations all around the school and that we were doing our best to get things in the right place, and to restart the composting this year.”
