Upon hearing a CBC radio interview about the toxic materials in batteries, we thought that we needed to do something. We put our heads together and came up with the idea of recycling batteries, ink cartridges and cell phones at our school. First, we conducted a survey to identify the types of recycling that families do at home and whether they would be interested in a program like this. We found out that lots of people would really like to recycle these things but just didn´t know how.

Students and their battery collection pails and posters.

We drew bar graphs to illustrate the results of our survey and presented them in a school assembly. We also made posters, visited classrooms, read poems, and made announcements to remind students to bring in their recycling. After compiling these results, we called the local electronic depots in our area to see if they already had different recycling programs in place. We also called the local dump to see if they took any of these types of waste. After all of that research, we were able to find programs for all three of these different types of waste.

St. Joseph students display their survey results.

Afterwards, we let the school know that we would be running a recycling program for these items and that the waste would be diverted from the landfill. So far we have been able to collect over 800 batteries, 8 cell phones and 109 ink cartridges! Our goal was to recycle 1000 batteries and we´re nearly there. We´ve decided to keep this program going and expand it next year by encouraging other schools in our district to start programs like this.

F. Papalia