recycle diagram

Is Darien Really Green?

More by Lily Boe - 11/10

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here is no denying that in the past decade, various attempts have been made to make our town more eco-friendly. However, our grocery stores still use the extremely harmful plastic bags that many environmental-friendly citizens would cringe at the site of. The cafeterias in the public schools serve food on those notorious Styrofoam or cardboard trays. The majority of our students drink from non-reusable plastic water bottles that they dispose of in the normal trash cans once they are finished. With all this in mind, my question is this: Are we as green as we say, or at least as green as we think we are?

Nearly four years ago, McKay Potter graduated from Darien High School. Potter was Community Council President of the Class of 2008. He certainly had the “green” mindset, as he strove to implement various environmentally friendly programs during his presidency. Potter had the opportunity to attend Darien High School in both the old building and the new one. The new Darien High School opened in fall 2005, and Potter took over as class president in the fall of 2007. “Having recently moved into the new building, we noticed that there weren’t any recycling bins,” Potter said. Community Council thus decided to take action. They coordinated with the custodians and were able to place recycling bins around school—in the classrooms and the cafeteria. Look around. DHS students, are there recycling bins in each of your classrooms? More importantly, are they being utilized?

“I definitely feel it’s important for the school to continue to do more to lessen our footprint on the environment and hopefully some of these things are still going,” Potter said.
Unfortunately, it does not seem that our school has made much progress since Potter left in 2008, although, not for a lack of trying. As a whole, DHS students just generally have not recognized the attempts that are being made to make our community “greener.”

At DHS, we are surrounded by nature. We are blessed to have a beautiful courtyard right at the center of our school, which, in good weather, is the ideal place to eat lunch. Unfortunately, some students do not respect the courtyard’s beauty as they leave their trash behind. During the school day, you might frequently see students picking up the neglected trash. These students are most often members of DHS’s Eco-Citizens club. Eco-Citizen member, Margot Soule, senior, believes that students not cleaning up after themselves in the courtyard demonstrates the town’s environmental problems and the lack of respect for the school.

The Eco-Citizens Club at DHS verifies that while we may not be as green as we would like to be, we are surely trying. The Eco-Citizens are dedicated to preserving and protecting our environment. The club has been around for three years now and is still growing. It is composed of truly passionate and dedicated students. The club and its members are certainly going to continue to expand and spread their message. Hopefully, in a few years, we will begin to see a difference. However, as of right now, much of the student body is unaware of their efforts to make us “greener.”

One thing that DHS students seem particularly uninformed about is the Eco-citizen’s recycling initiative.
“People don’t really know that we’re recycling. They view recycling bins as trash bins,” Soule said.
The Eco-Citizens have worked with the Administration to develop a three-box system.
“Ideally we’ll have a small black bin for trash, a bin for recyclables, and a cardboard box for recycling paper in every classroom,” Soule said.
However, Soule does not believe that students are aware of this three-box system. For starters, the system is not yet complete, as only about half the classrooms in the school have all three bins in them as of right now (mid-September). Senior President of Eco-Citizens Nina Preston agrees with Soule’s position.
“I don’t think people really care, which is unfortunate. It’s really a bummer because it is so important to recycle,” Preston said.
However, one of Preston’s goals as president is to raise more awareness about recycling so that people begin to care and cherish their environment.
           
The Eco-Citizens have also tried to encourage having every teacher select a student in his or her classroom who can take the class paper and container recycling bins and dump them into the larger ones in the hallway at the end of the school day. As disappointing as it is, both Preston and Soule say that they have not seen this happen. The reason for emptying the individual classroom bins into the larger ones in the hallways is to make the collecting process easier for the custodians. That way, they will not have to empty all three bins from every classroom one by one. Preston is concerned that if teachers are not taking their classroom bins to the hallway ones that the custodians may be clumping the contents of all three bins together.
           
As President of Eco-Citizens this year, Preston has set various goals, but her primary one is fairly simple: to raise awareness about the importance of our environment.
“I hope we can really get the recycling program in motion and get everybody involved and using it,” Preston said.
I hope for the same. The Eco-Citizens are working hard and their efforts deserve merit.
None of this is not to say that we, the residents of Darien, as private individuals, do not recycle in our homes. It is likely that many of us do. But, from what I have seen in school, it does not seem like people are making the effort to do some of the simple things that help our environment, like bringing a lunch box or a reusable water bottle to school. Most people are buying their lunches and eating them off of the harmful Styrofoam or cardboard trays, or just brown-bagging it.

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reston strongly encourages all DHS students to try to avoid plastic water bottles.
“We want everyone to be using reusable water bottles, of course.”
Preston makes an excellent point. Why are more people not using reusable water bottles? Filling them up can only take an extra thirty seconds of your day. Preston also suggested a future project that she hopes to tackle: eliminating the sale of plastic water bottles in the cafeteria. She heard that Cornell University recently did so. Her idea will clearly take a significant amount of time and effort to put in place, but it is brilliant, and certainly plausible. We are Darien High School, after all.

Soule also admits that she is extremely bothered by the number of students being driven to school by their parents when they have the option of taking the bus. She is right; the line of cars coming into the high school between 7:15 and 7:40 a.m. can be ridiculous.
“People could try to carpool more,” Soule said.
I condone every attempt that Eco-Citizens has made. I applaud every student who spends that extra 30 seconds filling up his or her Nalgene water bottle in the morning rather than just grabbing a Poland Spring. We are on our way to true “green-ness,” but, realistically, we just are not there yet.