Harvey High School is one of many schools in New Brunswick participating in Encorp’s Recycling Heroes in School program – a recycling program aimed at helping schools in the province recycle their deposit-bearing beverage containers. Their dedication and effort throughout the 2023-2024 school year made them one of the top 5 performing schools in the program! Through some impressive dedication and effective recycling setups at the school, Harvey High School managed to recycle nearly 60,000 beverage containers during the school year!
The Students Behind the School’s Success
The Recycling Heroes in School program is overseen by the school’s “Recycling Ambassadors” – a dedicated group of students that runs the beverage container recycling program in the school. The Recycling Ambassadors are made up of two students from the Student Council and some younger students from the school’s Laker Leaders initiative. Laker Leaders is a school program where students take on additional leadership opportunities, such as helping with school assemblies, spirit week, or other school activities (like beverage container recycling!). Together, these students are responsible for educating the community and their peers about container recycling, as well as collecting and preparing the containers to be returned to a redemption centre.
An Effective Recycling Set-Up
To capture all the beverage containers used in the school, recycling bins are placed in high-traffic areas of the school like the cafeteria, gym, and hallways. They also place the recycling bins near water fountains whenever possible, which gives people easy access to dump any remaining liquid from their container before placing it in the bin. Posters are hung near each bin, clearly demonstrating what can and cannot be recycled in the bins, which helps to ensure that the garbage and recyclables at the school get properly sorted.
Initially, the Recycling Ambassadors were emptying the recycling bins once per week. However, they found that the bins filled up quickly, so they transitioned to emptying twice per week, which ensured there was always space for recycling, and helped keep the hallways clean.
It’s also important to have a good storage location somewhere clean and dry where animals can’t get in. Thankfully, Harvey High School has a shed that the students can use to store the containers they collect from the bins. Then, once a month, one of the staff members drops the containers off at Cole’s Bottle Depot, where the school is able to collect the deposit refunds on the containers while ensuring they get recycled.
Recycling Education Leads to Success
A beverage container recycling program can only be successful if the staff and students at the school know how to participate. To make sure everyone knew about the program, the students with more leadership experience helped educate their peers by giving classroom presentations explaining how the program works, what containers can be returned to a redemption centre, and how to prepare containers for recycling. Dedicating this time to education reduced the number of unredeemable items placed in the bins, and ensured that recyclable and redeemable containers were collected, preventing them from going to any landfills. This student involvement, combined with posters near the bins that serve as a visual reminder, helped the program run smoothly and successfully.
Getting the Community Involved with Bottle Drives
In addition to collecting beverage containers in the school, Harvey High School ran bottle drives and set up various bottle donation drop-off locations in the community with their partner redemption centre – Cole’s Bottle Depot – so that community members could donate their beverage containers to the school. Harvey High School shared that much of their bottle drive success comes from consistent communication and marketing to the community. As part of their communication strategy, the school regularly posts on social media, making use of Instagram Stories, which allow them to post several times a day, ensuring they’re seen by a large portion of the community almost immediately. Harvey High School also sends out a weekly email and text message reminder to donate deposit-bearing beverage containers to the school. A bulletin board at the school, which provides various school updates, also includes bottle drive information.
The Impact on Harvey High School
Recycling deposit-bearing beverage containers means that the school can raise money by receiving those deposit refunds! Harvey High School uses the money collected from bottle drives and in-school recycling to invest back into the students. For example, the funds collected almost completely covered the Safe Grad activities for the entire 2024 graduating class.
In addition to the monetary benefit, the environmental impact left a lasting impression on the students. The Recycling Heroes in School program gave students the opportunity to really see how much waste was being diverted from landfills, and how recycling was able to benefit the school. Harvey High School is in the process of adding even more recycling options at the school, including paper and cardboard.
Just Do It – Recycling Helps
When the Recycling Ambassadors were asked what suggestions they had for schools considering a beverage container recycling program, they emphasized that scheduling time for education is important for the program to run smoothly. In addition to educating students, it is important to have a clean and enclosed area to store beverage containers until they can be returned to a redemption centre. The most powerful point the students wanted to share was, “Just do it – recycling helps.”
If your school isn’t part of Encorp’s Recycling Heroes in School program but you would like it to be, you can find all the information about the program along with an application form on our school program page.
