Here's My Great Green Idea!

What does St. John's do with the empty juice and soda cans and plastic water bottles found on campus? Never fear, the St. John's Recycling Rangers are here!

All third graders at St. John's Parish Day School in Ellicott City, Maryland are members of the Recycling Rangers. For the last three years, these creative, motivated, and concerned students have transformed themselves into recycling super heroes! Placing recycling containers at key spots on campus, the Recycling Rangers have educated the St. John's Church and School Community about the importance and necessity of recycling. In addition, they have used their super power recycling skills to hone their mathematic abilities. Each week when the students recycle, they count the number of cans, plastic bottles, and glass bottles they collect and graph the information. By March the students had collected and recycled over 1,600 items! It provides students the opportunity to project the amount of space they are saving from this material accumulating in a land-fill. In addition, St. John's recently purchased a new play structure that was created from 300,000 recycled plastic milk jugs. They saw how cool products can be created by the types of materials they are recyling.

The work of the Recycling Rangers combined with other efforts at St. John's to be good stewards of the earth resulted in St. John's being named a Maryland State Green School. In addition to recycling at school, many of the students have encouraged recycling at home if they are not already doing so. Faster than crushing a can, more clever than a land-fill junkie, the St. John's Recycling Rangers continue on their eco-crusade!