Marion launches a revolution?

We introduced you to our friend Marion, who was concerned about all the paper her children brought home from school and whether their school recycled.

Now comes this story from Southborough, Mass., with a parent voicing a similar question.

Here in Connecticut, the standard state science curriculum includes an Earth Science component, usually in Grades 4 and 6. In many schools, that component includes a trip to either our Garbage Museum in Stratford or our Trash Museum in Hartford, where our educators get students excited about recycling, teaching them that a lot of seemingly small actions can add up to a big positive impact on our environment.

It's frustrating to find out that some schools aren't always reinforcing this message.

Parents: do your schools recycle?

Teachers and administrators: do your schools recycle?

Does your school recycle?

Meet CRRABlog’s friend Marion.

She stopped by the other day to show us something interesting. She had pulled together all the work her nine-year-old third-grader had brought home from school this past year. Before she recycled it, she put the pile on a scale, and it weighed 17 pounds!

This got both of us thinking: how many schools have recycling programs? How many schools have recycling bins in their classrooms and cafeterias? How many of those bins are actually used? Using 17 pounds per pupil, a K-6 elementary school with 20 children in each class and three classes of each grade should be recycling three and a half tons of paper each year!

Does your school have a recycling program? We’d like to hear if it does – or doesn’t! And if the answer is “no,” maybe CRRA can help. Our education staff is ready to work with schools to help kick-start their recycling programs. Contact the Garbage Museum in Stratford or the Trash Museum in Hartford to find out more.

Teaching kids who teach the world

There's a terrific story in this morning's New Haven Register about six-year-old Cole Johnson of East Haven who, according to the story, was "bitten by the recycling bug during a visit to the Children’s Garbage Museum adjacent to the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority’s recycling facility in Stratford."

Now he's trying to get his school to expand its recycling program. Way to go, Cole!

Each year CRRA's education centers teach more than 50,000 people how to protect their environment with recycling and environmentally responsible waste disposal. We've always believed that if we teach children about recycling, they'll go and teach the grownups, and here's more evidence of that.