By Eli Bolus
Anyone who has been in the FC cafeteria lately can tell you there have been some major changes. The usual line of orderly trash cans has been rearranged, as they now sit in several new places with new directional signs. The labels on these signs say things like “plastic” and “food.” As you may have guessed this is the newest plan for the corporation wide recycling policy.
Principal Louie Jensen said this policy was implemented by New Albany Floyd County director of facilities Bill Wiseheart, and has been in the works for about two years.
NAFCS maintenance supervisor Steve Green said schools in the corporation are being added one at a time. He that the main reason they were able to implement this is because of a third party they hired. QRS Recycling is a nation-wide corporation that uses a new technique of recycling called “stream-line” to manage the green disposal means of schools and business. He said, “The reason we haven’t done this earlier is because people aren’t going to recycle if they have to sort dozens of things out.”
The beauty of QRS, he added, is that they will take 70 percent of the left over materials the school uses and sort and recycle them for them. This means as long as students sort the food away from everything else there is no other added work for cafeteria workers.
Jensen said the main reason the corporation is recycling should be to save the planet, but there are some other benefits as well. [Recycling] will save 10 percent of last year’s waste disposal cost after QRS’s fee said Jensen.
Jensen and Green both said they’re excited about the new policy but they expect some resistance from older students. Green said that younger kids in the elementary schools are more likely to embrace recycling than their older peers. “We hope that they will grow up with recycling and it will become more natural to them,” he said.
QRS will sort and recycling everything from cardboard to pencils for the corporation and save thousands of dollars.