Glencoe Elementary School

In 1997, our school had no recycling program in place at all. We formed a recycling plan and the first year we became an Oregon Green School. Two years later we achieved Merit status. In 2003, Glencoe Elementary became the first school in the Portland Public School District to obtain the rank of Premier Oregon Green School. We continue to maintain that elite status.

Our recycling program covers a number of areas, inside the school, as well as in the community. Our Glencoe Recycling Team gathers recyclable paper from classrooms and the office every Friday morning. The team estimates the weight, calculates the number of trees that we saved that week, and then updates our Glencoe Recycling Forest board weekly so students and parents can chart the great recycling efforts of our school.

Our lunch program encourages students to recycle all paper bags, plastic bottles, pop cans and other metal containers. We also have recycling bins in the hallways for water bottles and recyclable cans. These are then sorted and recycled or returned for deposit. The proceeds from our returnables help offset expenses for our Readers' Mountain program.

Classes have even taken our recycling ethic further. The 5th Grade Student Store sells notepads made out of one-sided "oops!" copies from our copy machines. What a great way to further the life of a sheet of paper. Thanks to the efforts of Mrs. Krambule's class for thinking of this great idea. The 5th grade classes also collect reusable items such as egg cartons, paper towel and toilet paper roles, etc. and make great Native American masks out of them. One of our 2nd grade classes each spring has an invention time where students make new "inventions" out of reusable items.

The Great Locker Clean-Out
At the end of each school year we participate in The Great Locker Clean-Out Program. Recycling stations are set up in the hallways where students and staff can deposit materials for recycling and reuse. Each year we collect paper, file folders, crayons, scissors, colored pencils, colored markers, clothing, pencils, glue/gluesticks and numerous other items for reuse. After the items are sorted, they are distributed among various programs as well as some being saved to use within the classrooms. Programs we support by distributing our reusable items are:  DART, the Janus Program, overseas schools, PTA Clothes Closet, Schoolhouse Supplies, SCRAP and Albina Head Start. Only the broken or used-up items are discarded. We even saved the marker caps for SCRAP to use in their creative art programs! Everyone in the school has come to embrace this worthwhile program and many outside groups have benefited from our recycling efforts.

School-wide Recycling Projects
We also have several school-wide recycling projects that go out into the community. One is recycling printer cartridges and cell phones. Parents and community members bring in empty ink cartridges and old cell phones which in turn are picked up by a local company. Another project is collecting QFC plastic bags. These are bagged, turned in, and later made into new garbage bags. Money from this project helps support our library. For years we have collected pull-tabs from aluminum cans. These are saved and turned in to Ronald McDonald House to help support their programs. In 2009 we turned in 64 pounds of pull-tabs! That's a lot of pull-tabs when you think about it! Recently we started collecting old tennis shoes to support the NIKE Grind program. Shoes are tossed into the collection bin in the library and then taken to NIKE where they are ground up and processed to make new products and playground/track surfaces. In the 6 weeks that we ran the program in the spring of 2009, we collected 136 pairs of tennis shoes. We have decided to make this an ongoing project at our school. We collected 132 pairs this year - 2010. We came close to breaking last year's record. A new project that one of our parents started this year was collecting all those used plastic gift cards that everyone uses. Instead of throwing them away, we collect them and then send them off to a company in the Midwest that makes new gift cards out of them. What a great way to continue to recycle plastic!

Community Outreach
Glencoe is always interested in reaching out to the community, whether it is within our own parent-based community or our community at large. Each year to celebrate Earth Day, students decorate 1500 grocery sacks from our neighborhood QFC. After decorating them for a week, we return them to the store. They in turn use them to bag groceries on that day, sending our recycling messages out to the community. It is great to see customers bring the bags back to the store to be used again, letting us know that our messages are being recognized!

Outreach to Other Schools
Glencoe is always willing to help other schools get started with recycling programs or help them improve the ones they have. "Green Teams" from other schools have visited us to learn about our program and to check out our worm bins. Metro has brought interested people from other districts to our school as part of a "Recycling Program Tour" to gather ideas and see how our program works. We have also worked with people interested in recycling programs from Arizona and Portland State University.

Worm Bins
We use to have two worm bins at Glencoe, The Titanic and The Yellow Submarine. To find out more information on them click on worms. We had to give them up due to lack of time to maintain them. They went to two different schools within our district that are very happy to have worms now for composting.

For more information on Oregon Green Schools, visit their site at: Oregon Green Schools