Sutton Elementary students study concerns about trash and pollution

Did you know that every day the United States uses enough plastic straws to go around the world two and a half times? We wonder how many straws the whole world uses in one day? This concerns us because this is our world and we don’t want to trash it.

We are concerned about the world’s trash and pollution, so our class did a waste audit to find out how much trash our school makes during lunch. For three days, we sorted, counted, cleaned, weighed, and recorded our school’s lunch trash. We also interviewed students and asked why they were throwing their food away.

We learned that although we are a small school of 60 students we make a lot of trash. We found that we throw out an average of 18 pounds of food a day. One day we threw out 8 pounds of milk. We threw out an average of 151 plastic food wrappers, 31 sporks, and 33 straws a day. Most students were throwing out their food because they did not like it or they were full.

We feel like garbage because of all this waste, so we are making some changes. We have bought reusable items for our school so we will not create as much waste. With a grant we received from ALPAR, we bought reusable sporks, and trays, for the whole school to use, and lunch kits for the students in our class. In addition, we are making cloth napkins to replace paper ones. Will you please spread the word of the importance of reducing waste and recycling in our schools?

If our school of 60 students can make that much trash, imagine what our whole school district makes; imagine what the whole world makes. This is an important issue to us because this is our world and we want it clean and beautiful. Thank you for reading this and for helping us keep our world clean and healthy.

4th and 5th Grade Class

Sutton Elementary School