Bigelow Green Team Presents to the School Committee

On Monday, Jan 13, the Bigelow Green Team went to the School Committee meeting and spoke about their initiatives and concerns.

“Thank you for listening about how we are trying to make Bigelow more sustainable and reduce Bigelow’s carbon and plastic footprints. Our team first organized in the spring of 2019, and we have already accomplished a lot.

We have ordered anti-idling parking signs from the state to be placed around our school, and they are getting posted soon! Bigelow now collects and recycles markers through Crayola’s ColorCycle program.  In October, we sent over 600 old markers to Crayola for recycling. We placed a paper only recycling bin in the copy room for teachers to better ensure the paper gets recycled. We are working with the custodial staff to solve the problem of incorrect items placed in the recycling bins, as these bins all get emptied into the trash. We are planning an Advisory Activity to better educate the Bigelow community about the choices they make and how this impacts our environment. We wrote a letter to Christine Flutie at Whitsons about our concerns.  We heard back with pretty discouraging news that none of our requests or ideas are being considered. It sounds like this is mostly due to cost issues.

Our first concern is that Meatless Mondays are full of meat! Today is supposed to be Meatless Monday, and sausages were served for lunch. More bottled water options seems to have INCREASED single-use plastic waste at Bigelow.  And plastic utensils are still offered at each meal. We have not seen the reusable food containers that Whitsons promised, and also they have added even more plastic containers to some of the lunches. For example, burgers used to have a wrapper, and now sometimes they are placed in wrappers and then inside a plastic box too.

Thank you for listening to our initiatives and concerns.”

See presentation hereBigelow Green Team 1_13_20