Grades of Green
Grades of Green at Meadows: Trash Free
Lunches, Walk to School Wednesdays and More!
Grades of Green is
helping Meadows families become even more environmentally friendly than ever
this year. All students participate in Trash Free Lunches every Tuesday and
Wednesday, helping to decrease the amount of trash our school generates by up to
90% those days (click
here
for more info on Trash Free Lunches). Every
Wednesday morning our volunteers are at the Rowell gate stamping hands
and handing out bracelets for
Walk to School Wednesday, decreasing fuel
usage and automotive emissions. Learn more ways you can go green at
www.gradesofgreen.org, the official
nonprofit started by a group of Manhattan Beach parents. Please contact
beckymccalla@hotmail.com or
mirnapuma@verizon.net if you’d like
to be part of the green movement at Meadows.
Grades of Green also
has a variety of programs to dispose of waste like batteries, cell phones,
non-recyclable drink pouches and old tennis shoes properly. Click
here
to learn more.
Lastly, keep your
eyes open for the upcoming Monthly Green Challenge; every student will have the
opportunity to complete the challenge each month. Turn it in by the last Monday
of the month, and your student will be put into a raffle to be pulled on the
last Friday of the month. Great prizes for participating and all those small
changes really add up for our environment!
Trash Free
Lunches
Did you know that the
average person in the U.S. consumes twice as many goods today as we did fifty
years ago – and generates 4 ½ pounds of garbage every day, two times what we
generated just thirty years ago? That
is pretty horrifying when you think of our landfill legacy we’re leaving our
children and grandchildren. The good thing is that there are some very easy ways
to make small changes. If we all make a few small changes – like making a
concerted effort for our Trash Free Tuesdays – that can add up to some big
changes.
Every Trash Free
Lunch we staff with parent volunteers helps save an average of 7-8 trash bags.
It doesn’t matter if your child is packing lunch or buying, we help empty out
milk cartons and juice boxes to recycle, fill the compost bucket with scraps of
fruits and vegetables and stack the trays to be recycled. You can use some of
our tricks every week for all the snacks, drinks and lunches you pack; start
with minimizing use of juice boxes, plastic water bottles, zip top baggies and
snack size portions with two or three layers of packaging.
You can probably cut your daily trash in
half with these little changes! Here are some specifics (and suggestions for
places to buy the basics if what you have isn’t quite working):
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Juice boxes,
plastic water bottles,
disposable milk boxes
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Reusable bottles and thermoses
like those at
www.kleankanteen.com,
www.shopthermos.com and
www.mysigg.com
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Zip top baggies
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Wax paper, foil, reusable
plastic containers,
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Paper bag for lunchtime
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We all probably have a small
fleet of reusable lunchboxes, but check out those at
www.gogreenlunchbox.com
for a fantastic all-in-one option to support a local business. Order through
Meadows again in the Springtime and we’ll earn $5 for each $30 lunchbox sold.
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Recycle used
Batteries, Ink Cartridges and Cell Phones
You can also drop off
your old batteries, empty ink cartridges and used cell phones in the office in
order to keep them out of our landfills (that sounds better than having heavy
metals like cadmium and mercury leach into the soil and groundwater, doesn’t
it?). Even better, we send the old cell phones and used ink cartridges to
eScrip, so it’s an easy fundraiser for the Meadows PTA as well!
Empty Capri Sun and
Honest Kids drink pouches are sent to www.terracycle.net to be turned into some really
inventive products like fences, purses and pencil cases.
Or, donate to the
Nike Reuse-A-Shoe Used Shoe Drive every April to turn our old ratty tennis shoes
into Nike Grind playground surfacing. Learn more at
http://www.nikereuseashoe.com.