HC Recycling discontinued for the foreseeable future

By Rowyn Moore

 If you’ve been at HC for a couple of years, you might have noticed the absence of a certain blue recycling bin. They used to be placed in every classroom, next to the small metal trash cans, and were always overflowing with paper. Teachers would constantly remind students to recycle and to help the planet. 

For the 2019-2020 school year, HC has discontinued recycling paper products.

“As of right now, it’s costing the city more money than to find someone to recycle it than to send it to the landfill,” FCPS Sustainability Coordinator Tresine Logsdon said. “So, it’s a purely economic decision.”

As a result, more teachers are using technological resources such as Google Classroom and Chromebooks. 

85% of recycling coming out of schools is paper. So when paper can’t be recycled, a lot of it is unnecessarily going to landfills. 

“It’s really important that we recycle as much as possible because the Earth only has a finite amount of resources,” HC Human Geography Teacher Robbie Biddle said. 

Logsdon explains that a lot of the reason the decision was made is because of relations with China. While China is still buying most of the recycling, they have decided they don’t want to buy the U.S.’s paper anymore. Finding somewhere for paper to be recycled was very costly so the decision for a temporary standstill was made.

“We do not have the infrastructure here in the U.S.[for recycling],” Logsdon said. “We could make that investment, and it is possible our hand will be forced. It will be a difficult economic  decision to build the recycling infrastructure that we need here in America to handle all the recycling we have.”

If there is an inability to recycle paper, there are other environmentally friendly things people can do. A study by the Brookings Institute stated that carbon emissions were extremely high in Lexington compared to Honolulu emissions per capita. Carbon emissions play a large part in this result.

As a whole, more people can also be very wary of leaving the lights on or even how much water we’re using. Everybody can also cut down on the use of plastic bottles, plastic straws, and plastic bags.

“Our current environmental climate is declining in its health,” Go Green Club President Mary Elizabeth Hanna said. “It has been nationally publicized by U.S. scientists that we have very little time to save the detrimental changes we’ve made to our environment. Recycling is one step toward having a more green community.”

Lexington hopes to add paper back into the recycling plan before the end of 2019. There are two recycling centers in the region that city officials are looking into for our paper recycling needs. While there are no promises being made at this time, Lexington officials are doing all they can to resume the recycling of paper products. As of right now, HC has no plans to restart recycling. 

“The schools that have stopped [recycling] find it to be a much harder challenge to restart,” Logsdon said. “The schools that continued have found it hard because of contamination. It’s just a very difficult season we’re in right now.”