Green Team’s Recycling Struggle

Green Team is an eco-friendly club in Fair Grove High School. They’re most known for collecting the school’s recycling, but they used to play a much larger role in the community.

“We used to have a much bigger impact because we had a mixed recycling container, so we used to be able to recycle plastic and recycle cans. We also used to be able to recycle cardboard and now we can only recycle plastic and ship cardboard, which is, like, cereal boxes,” Englis, the Green Team conductor, explained. “We tried for a little bit to get started back up when the company moved, so they’re not even accessible to us. But recycling is so hard right now. The state of recycling when they were trying to decide that they weren’t going to take our recycling at the same capacity and that they were, and they were going to up the standards of recycling that we could export to them.”

Englis continued, “There’s been a ton of recycling companies that have gone out of business, we use to make a much bigger impact because we were sorting all of our cans and all of our plastic bottles that came out of our vending machines and we can’t do that anymore. So, right now, we do have that paper recycling and it is available to everybody that’s in the district here at school.”

“I definitely have some big ideas that I hope to implement for Green Team in the future. I think that some kind of community clean-up event could really help make our school and planet way more clean and do some real good for the people around us,” Cooper Zumwalt (11), Vice Captain President, elaborated.

One of Green Team’s ongoing projects includes handing out reusable Fair Grove bags to elementary kids. “For the next four years, we have committed to every Elementary having a reusable bag that they can use for their groceries, and when we give them that reusable Fair Grove Recycling bag we teach them about recycling. We teach them about types of recycling, and how to store it,” Englis shared.

There have been many leading factors to recycling companies in the community of Fair Grove shutting down. Green Team continues to collect recycle in hopes of pursuing an ecofriendly world.