 | asheville business & community directory |
|
The Burton St Community Center 21st Century middle school students are not just talking the talk they are walking the sustainable walk by developing a recycling program and center for the Burton Street Community Center. Students have been working with Rachel Doebber, the new Sustainability Outreach Specialist with the City of Asheville Office of Sustainability, since early February to improve their recycling program by designing posters and improving recycling instructions.After learning how long it takes some trash materials to decompose in a landfill (i.e. it takes up to 500 years for an aluminum can to break down and 1 million years for a plastic bottle to breakdown) students understand the importance of recycling these items instead of taking up space in landfills that should be used for items that decompose faster. Students also matched up recycled items with final products. Examples of recycled items that can be transformed into new uses are milk jugs that can be made into park benches, soda bottles into carpets and glass bottles into asphalt. Students recently rolled out their new recycling program in early March at Burton Street Community Center. The program includes marketing posters and correctly labeled bins and carts for the Center. In addition, the students plan to create a music video on the importance of recycling to share with other students and community center afterschool programs to encourage them to recycle. Tameka Crudup, the Director of the Burton Street Community Center feels that “The recycling program at Burton Street Center has established ownership and accountability with not only our ongoing participants, but with our drop in participants as well. It has also created a sustainable expectation through out the community.” Conducting environmental education outreach with the Community Centers is part of the Office of Sustainability’s mission to implement the Sustainability Management Plan City Council passed in 2009 in order to reach the goal to reduce the City’s carbon footprint 80% by the year 2050 or 2% each year. The recycling education outreach program will be implemented in all the City of Asheville Community Centers with the goal of having improved programs up and running by December 2010. For more information on the recycling program and educational outreach program, contact Rachel Doebber at rdoebber@ashevillenc.gov or Burton Street Center Director Tameka Crudup at tcrudup@ashevillenc.gov. (Image provided by Burton Street Community Center.)
|
