Going Green

In class, our current unit is all about Mother Nature. Ways that humans are harming the earth, ways that we can help the earth, and ways that we as a class can help our school to become more Green. To make our school more Green, our class has split up into two seperate groups. One is focusing on implementing collabrative consumption into our school, and the other (the one that I'm a part of) is forming a "Green Team" at school. This Green Team is a conscious effort by both the faculty and to follow the three R's, reduce, reuse, and recycle. To gain some support for this movement, we are organizing a Flick Tournament at school. In the Flick Tournament, students will bring aluminum cans, and there will be tournament-style flick wars, with the loser leaving the tournament and the winner moving onto the next round. We are then going to take the aluminum cans that the students have brought and recycle them properly. Our group's hope is that through this fun activity, students throughout the school can see just how easy it is to recycle, and make positive choices in the future. In the Green Team, I have been helping everyone out, looking up recycling facts, helping to come up with the concept of the Flick Tournament, being a human dictionary when my fellow classmates write letters to the administrators and staff concerning the Green Team. I guess you could say that I have been all over the place.

We have learned more about the need for recycling by watching a documentary called Tapped. This movie has probably been the most effective, for me, in that it makes me want to recycle more. The images in this movie of darkened skies over factories that make water bottles, clear oceans filled with plastic bottles, and towns being depleted of their resources because of the bottled water industry made me want to change my ways immediately.

Since we began our journey to become more eco-friendly, I think that I have changed. I have always recycled my cans, bottles, and papers, but since we began our Green unit in Gifted and Talented, I have become a lot more aware of all of the issues concernint the environment. I feel that my greatest gift from this unit that sense of awareness that i have gained. Now, when I drink out of plastic water bottles (yes, I still drink out of plastic water bottles), I feel guilty because I know the repercussions that this will have on nature.When I use plastic bags at the supermarket, I know that it will take years for that thin little bag to decompose in a landfill. This unit has been both informational and interesting. Learning about Terra Cycle (a company that uses all recycled items to make their goods), and collabrative consumption (look at my last blog post for a more in depth explanation) are two things that I found quite interesting about the Green unit. Overall, I definetly feel that the knowledge that I am gaining now will go everywhere with me for the rest of my adult life.