Goff Organic Garden
Recycling
Reduce & Reuse out Waste

Goff Middle School has a Governor's Award winning recycling program that is a collarberative effort between the students and the custodial staff.

This program's goal is more about awareness than waste. It's main purpose is to raise student consciousness of the garbage they create every day, and offer them new choices to create a renewable lifestyle and sustainable society.

Thus, students not only collect recyclable materials from classrooms and offices, but they weigh and measure the amount they collect to reinforce their awareness of how much they throw away, and the resources they conserve by recycling.

The ultimate goal of this program isn't merely to recycle resources, but to make students aware of how to reduce the volume of waste they create by the choices they make -- to make students aware of the power they have by their daily actions to reduce waste and pollution, conserve natural resources and affect their world and society.

We hope they take this awareness home, and put it to work conserving and recycling resources in other parts of their lives and community.

In the school buildings, there are two different recycling stations, one at the front of the building, and one at the back

Each station has a large round container for co-mingled glass, plastic and metal. The large taller blue container is for recycled inkjet catridges

Each one of the offices in our buildings has a blue rectangular recycle bucket right next to the garbage can.

It's important that the recycle bin stay near the garbage can so that it's an easy choice to recycle or put in the garbage. If they are not next to each other, you will get a mixture of garbage and paper in both.

T.A. Predle's Recycling in Schenectady provides large flip-top totes. Students then empty the recylced paper into the large totes. Each of these totes are placed at different locations in the building.

Recycling days are Wednesday and Fridays at Goff Middle School.

During the morning announcements, the announcers will say, "Today is a recycling day. One student from each homeroom should empty their blue recycling bucket now."

One student from each room takes their blue recycling bucket and empties it into the large flip-top tote that is closest to their location.

By doing this, 80 to 90% of the building is emptied of recycled paper in less than ten minutes.

All other rooms in the building that do not have a homeroom -- house offices, physical education offices, library, computer lab, maintenance, nurses offices -- are broken down into runs.

Students take those flip-top totes and walk around the building to empty buckets in these rooms.

Here, two students move through the hallways to pick up the buckets.

We secured a $1000 grant through NYS Learn and Serve America to purchase an industrial scale.

Students pull each tote onto the scale, and record its weight. They subtract 30 pounds for the weight of the tote.

Students keep track of the amount of paper that is recycled in the building using the monthly recycling total.

Students log the data down after each time they do their recycling work.

In Goff Middle School, there are three different houses: Blue House, Red House and Green House. Students also coordinate two separate runs to pick up the recycled paper in any room in the building that does not have a homeroom.

We also have three different marble boards at the front of the building, one for each house. A marble board is a long board with a slots routed into the wood and covered with a sheet of plexiglas.

When students add marbles it creates a bar graph showing how much paper each house at Goff Middle School has recycled.

Eight marbles represent 100 pounds of paper, which means each marble is 12.5 pounds.

Students need to divide the total amount of paper that has been recycled for the month after each run, and make sure that the correct number of marbles are in each of the house marble awards.

Students also pick up the co-mingled glass, plastic and metal, and inkjet cartridges.

Goff Middle School has a TV studio. At the end of each month, students announce the amount of paper that was recycled and the environmental benefit derived from our recycling.

Recycling just one ton of paper saves:

-17 trees
-Over 7000 gallons of water
-Eliminates 60 pounds of air pollution
-Saves enough energy to power the average home for six months.