Beginning this year, the school will have a new recycling program in the hope of minimizing waste and maximizing the amount of trash recycled. The school plans to use a simple dual-stream system. Students will only need to decide whether something is edible or not before putting their trash into one of the bins.

“Even if you have a cardboard plate, you can throw your half-eaten sandwich into the food bin and put the cardboard plate into recycling,” Assistant Principal Galen Rosenberg said. “The rule basically is: if you can eat it, throw it in the food bin; if you can’t eat it, throw it in recycling.”

All the school’s non-organic waste will be collected by the recycling company Recology for sorting and recycling at its facilities. This means that students and the Green Team will no longer need to sort it themselves. All the organic material will continue to be composted.

“I think in the long run all communities need to produce less waste, and we need the infrastructure to make that happen,” Rosenberg said. “A public high school should, as much as possible, play a leadership role to make that happen.”

[Photos by Ciera Pasturel]