The Bag it Plastic Free School contest's mission is to inspire students to reduce their own and their community’s use of single-use plastics in the form of bags, bottles, and other packaging, while participating in a fun, interactive project that will stimulate direct action and change.
Here's a message from Bag It star Jeb Berrier and Bag It baby William to inspire you to join in the fun!
Limiting plastic use at their school. Bag It! Movie Night, re-usable water bottle, student movie, Facebook page to stop people from leaving plastic around and educate people on the truth about plasticStudents in Marine Biology PBL class have been working on projects relating to ocean conservation and wildlife protection. Students have researched marine animals of their choice, taught about them to the class and made movies to show on our school television broadcast, KBIS.
The EcoChico Environmental Club at Carolina Friends School wants to encourage students and staff to reduce the use of plastic within the school and our community. We understand that all forms of plastic harm animals, the ocean, and our environment in general. We think that we can have an impact within our immediate school community and beyond. We have a number of initiatives that we are working on to achieve this goal that will be outlined below.We are hoping to reduce the amount of plastic used both at school and within our community in many ways. We want to encourage the use of reusable grocery bags, and we want to reduce the number of plastic utensils used at our school. In addition, we want to provide a way for students and parents to recycle plastic materials that are not normally collected in our community. Another goal for us is to spread awareness of the damage that plastics cause to the environment. Finally, we want to become activists by encouraging our local mayors to ban plastic grocery bags.We want to sell two hundred fifty reusable grocery bags from the Elizabeth Haub Foundation to encourage their use instead of plastic bags. We also want the school store to charge a fee for plastic utensils so that we can encourage students to bring their own utensils. We hope to promote awareness of how plastic damages the environment by showing the “Bag It” movie and follow up discussions. We also want to raise the issue of banning plastic bags or at least charging a fee for them in local grocery stores. We will use the money from our Haub bag fundraisers to purchase aluminum water bottles for each student so they will not bring plastic bottles to school. We will also continue our Terracycle program where we collect dairy containers and send them to the Terracycle company to be upcycled.We can count the number of Haub bags that we sell. We can count the number of plastic spoons that are used. We can interview people to find out what they learned from the film and if it changed their behavior in any way. Once we receive the water bottles, we can see how many students use them on a regular basis. We can count the number of yogurt containers we have sent to Terracycle.Our immediate audience is the CFS Middle School. However, we will share the film with the Upper School Environmental Club and see if they will sponsor a screening for their students. Our Terracycle program and Haub bag sales are school wide activities.1. We will sell 100 Haub bags prior to Halloween. We will advertise the sale with posters around the school and short skits presented at announcement time. We will sell the bags right next to the carpool line before and after school for three days.We sold 100 Haub bags in October. We plan to sell 150 more at the Recycling Fair in April. The Recycling Fair is an annual event where people bring their gently used children’s clothing and trade them. We charge $5 for a Haub bag and you can fill it with as many clothes as you can.
The Mill Creek High School Environmental Club created an earthbench made with plastic water bottles filled with plastic bags and Styrofoam in celebration of America Recycles Day in November 2012 at Mill Creek High School. Additionally, students organized a recycling drive, brought in an ecological educator to speak to classes about plastics pollution, hosted an afterschool screening of “Bag It,” and even developed a mobile application called Plastics Police.Plastics pollution, especially single-use plastics, is one of the greatest 21st century threats to our human and ecological health. Our society is hooked on a substance that can be used in 5 minutes, but will spend nearly forever in the landfill or as litter alongside our roadways or in our oceans. Additionally, plastics are made from non-renewable resources and when used in packaging plastics can leach chemicals into our food. Single-use plastics are the most unsustainable invention ever created, yet the easiest to solve. By educating consumers, we can make better choices the support our environment and ourselves.We consider living a life with fewer plastics the gateway drug to becoming an environmentalist. Choosing not to use disposable plastic is an easy choice that anyone can make and it doesn/'t require much of anything but a little thinking. The Mill Creek Environmental Club would like our entire school community to realize the huge plastics pollution problem we have here at Mill Creek High School and around the world.Since it takes 1,000 years for plastics to photodegrade, we challenged ourselves to involve 1,000 students in our community-wide campaign for plastics-free initiatives.We keep track of numbers by recording the number of people who participate.We look forward to securing funding to be able to build another earthbench for America Recycles Day 2013. We will keep sharing our message through our mobile application, Plastics Pollution. You can download the application by going to www.plasticspolice.org on your mobile device and adding it to your homescreen.
This is an entirely student-run project, and we are trying to lower the water bill at our school by 10%. We are solving the issue of water being unnecessarily wasted. Our desired results are for everyone in our school to understand just how important water is. We will quantify our results by speaking in assemblies, putting up posters, and just really setting an example for others.Our project was executed with a leadership team of four students at Mill Creek High School alongside some really great partners such as Greening Forward, Peace on Earthbench Movement, and Gwinnett County Parks and Recreation. We first reach out to the Peace on Earthbench Movement over the summer and began fundraising to bring a natural builder to our school for a week to show us how to build the earthbench. We then worked with the cross country team to get hundreds of plastic bottles and our Environmental Club brought in plastic bags from home that we filled the plastic bottle with. Then, on the week of America Recycles Day we built the foundation to the earthbench and celebrated America Recycles Day (November 15, 2012) with school-wide presentations and a viewing of Bag It.
We aim to change Boulder from a disposable society into a sustainable society by addressing plastic pollution, a central and visible aspect of today’s disposable culture. Our focus is to move Boulder to ban single-use grocery bags to lessen our impact on the waste stream and raise environmental awareness in our community. Though we are working toward a ban, we agree with the Boulder City Council that it is necessary to first implement the newly passed fee/fee bag ordinance (which our efforts directly led to) so that the city residents will have an incentive to change their behavior.We will address the ignorance and apathy towards the environment in the majority of Boulder’s citizens. People are unaware of the environmental consequences of habitual behaviors like single-use grocery bags, and this lack of environmental awareness is behind most problems facing the world today, especially plastic pollution. Many of these bags end up in the ocean, where they photodegrade and damage marine ecosystems. They also end up in our food, harming our bodies. Our project targets these plastic bags to reduce their environmental effects and help to illuminate the environmental impacts of everyday behavior to people in our city.The primary goal of our project is to help our community realize its environmental impact by instigating a ban on plastic and paper bags. After we lobbied city council for 18 months to address plastic pollution by passing an ordinance to reduce plastic bag use. They passed a 10 cent fee on plastic and paper bags because of our efforts. People will be discouraged from using these bags; and the fee is a transition for Boulder so the public can progress and prepare for future changes. Our goal in doing this is to raise environmental awareness while addressing plastic pollution.In advocating for this plastic and paper bag ordinance, our primary goal is to encourage more sustainable behaviors within the Boulder community. We hope that the rest of the United States will then follow Boulder’s example, and ultimately adopt a more sustainable mindset. Our desired results, although they include the reduction of our plastic waste, mainly concern the shift in consumer behavior towards more environmentally conscious actions.First of all, our work has already resulted in Boulder passing a law to limit plastic and paper bag use. After our efforts to promote this change, which include extensive research on the effects of bag ordinances nationwide, Letters to the Editor to the Boulder Daily Camera, lobbying for action at Boulder City Council meetings, and bag booths held at the Colorado Oceans Symposium, the city finally enacted an ordinance placing a fee/fee on plastic/paper bags on November 15, 2012. This ordinance goes into effect July of 2013 in 45 food retailer stores citywide. According to the nexus study issued by Boulder City Council, the projected average reduction of single-use bags is 74% (approximately 10.2 million single-use bags) over a four-year period. Since our primary goal is to raise awareness concerning plastic bags in Boulder, we want to quantify the direct effects on the population. Though it is difficult to measure the awareness of Boulder’s people, the bag ordinance is expected to reduce bag use per capita in the city which will indicate a behavioral shift away from the disposable mindset of using single-use items.Our target audience is the city of Boulder, Colorado, but we hope that, by making Boulder an example and putting it at the forefront of the bag movement, our audience will spread to ultimately encompass the United States.Since the spring of 2011, the single-use bag campaign has been the primary focus of our club. We started by conducting extensive research on single-use plastic bag ordinances not only in the U.S. but in other countries including China and Ireland. Consequently, we decided to take action first by encouraging Boulder policymakers to implement an ordinance on the usage of plastic/paper bags. In addition to our attendance at City Council meetings, we wrote Letters to the Editor to the Boulder Daily Camera in order to spread awareness of the issue. As a result of our campaign, the Fairview Net Zero Club was invited to host booths about plastic pollution at the Boulder Creek Festival and CU Boulder Ocean Symposium. Even after the passing of the fee bag ordinance in the City of Boulder, we hope to continue our efforts by ultimately achieving a total ban on both plastic and paper bags.We started our project in March 2011 by doing extensive research on the environmental effects of plastic and how other cities such as San Francisco and Seattle had effectively (or not as effectively) reduced the use of single-use grocery bags. As a club, we agreed that our eventual goal should be to change the City of Boulder’s master plan for waste reduction to include a ban on both plastic and paper grocery bags. To accomplish this goal, as we have described above, we spoke at city council for 18 months, wrote letters to the editor, and held booths at local environmental events such as the University of Colorado Ocean Symposium. These efforts successfully convinced Boulder’s City Council to enact an ordinance placing a 10 cent fee on both plastic and paper bags which will go into effect in July 2013. Our project has already impacted the entire city of Boulder (100 thousand people) and people from surrounding areas who shop at Boulder’s grocery stores. In addition to passing the ordinance on single-use grocery bags, our efforts to pass this law have increased the environmental awareness of our community. For example, at a public input meeting that our club attended, we were able to inform the audience of 50 people (who were originally split on whether or not to address the bag issue) on the environmental effects of the grocery bags and persuade them that the city needed to take action. At the end of the meeting, the city staff representative took a vote and the attendees voted nearly unanimously to address the issue of single-use grocery bag use in our city. Our numerous newspaper headlines and letters to the editor also spread awareness about this issue and the environment in general. We expect the impact on awareness and plastic pollution itself to increase once the ordinance is passed in July.
Educating pre schoolers and their community about problems related to plastic. their desired results are for everyone in our school to understand just how important water is by speaking in assemblies, putting up posters, and just really setting an example for othersOur project was executed with a leadership team of four students at Mill Creek High School alongside some really great partners such as Greening Forward, Peace on Earthbench Movement, and Gwinnett County Parks and Recreation. We first reach out to the Peace on Earthbench Movement over the summer and began fundraising to bring a natural builder to our school for a week to show us how to build the earthbench. We then worked with the cross country team to get hundreds of plastic bottles and our Environmental Club brought in plastic bags from home that we filled the plastic bottle with. Then, on the week of America Recycles Day we built the foundation to the earthbench and celebrated America Recycles Day (November 15, 2012) with school-wide presentations and a viewing of Bag It.
Green Team students have quietly worked sorting recyclables for our school’s Terracycle Brigades. The products (lids, dairy tubs, glue sticks, tape cores/dispensers, energy bar wrappers, candy wrappers, personal care products, cheese packaging and oral care products) are packaged and students get those packages to a UPS store for shipping to the recycling center. To date, their recycling efforts have resulted in over one hundred ten dollars for the Nature Conservancy. Reusing, up cycling or recycling items that cannot be recycled through our local curbside and co-mingle recycling bins. The primary goal is to raise awareness in our community about the need for all members of the school and community to realize the impact of their daily use of single-use disposables and change their habits! We would like to see an increase in our weekly intake of recycling from one bin per class to two bins per week per class. We would like to see an increase in our Terracycle brigade shipments from once every two weeks to twice a week. We would like our school to use standard lunch trays and real silverware instead of disposable styrofoam trays and plastic silverware. We will quanify our results based on the numbers listed above and additionally from the attitudes and habits and discussions had by students and staff at our school and in our community. We want to start the change but we will not stop by being the only change agents. We want to continue to grow our green team from currently 40 active members to all 530 students in our school. We would like to inspire other schools to become WA State Green Schools by following the program that we did through the Washington State Department of Ecology. Our target audience is Yakima County. We are trying to promote sustainablility and encourage all community members to be responsible citizens and think about the impact that they have as individuals in the world. We meet two days a week after school for a half hour to accomplish our mission. Students also work outside of school promoting our cause. We are starting to write letters to the community newspaper, The Yakima Herald Republic explaining our actions. We have a green team scrapbook that includes each member/'s name and picture and reasons they joined green team and their global footprint score. This project is a work in progress.. We hope to connect all our Yakima School District schools with a green team in each school. By giving students this responsiblility we are empowering them to have ownership and develop lifelong habits of earth stewardship. We are working on a chant/dance for our Green Schools Assembly when we get awarded the flag from the Department of Ecology. We have reached all members of our school community and many of their parents . Approximately 700 people. I have tried to attach a copy of our green team anthem and our letter to the editor.. but they didn/'t load right... thank you for your time and energy in putting forth this contest.
We want to encourage people to stop using single-use disposable plastic bags by educating them about the dangers of disposable plastics. We will be giving away reuseable cloth bags. We willl work with our cafiteria at our school to stop using plastic water bottles and plastic utensils and replace them with paper cups and metal utensils. We plan on giving a public viewing of the "Bag it" film at our local theatre, and having an assembly at our school to provide information and solutions to plastics in the environment. We are getting rid of plastic sporks and water bottles in our school and reducing plastic bags at stores. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us.Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. Our goal is to give away up to 500 reusable cloth bags that contain a flyer with information about the dangers of single use disposable plastics in our environment. We want to reduce plastic consumption and educate the public. We will set up a table at different stores to give our bags away. We will have posters and information about the dangers to animals, the ocean and all of us. We will ask around in our community and watch for our bags throughout town. We are going to estimate the reduction of plastic sporks and bottles per day in our school. Our target audience are students and the staff at our school and our whole community. Our target audience are students and the staff at our school and our whole community. We meet once a week to plan and work on our project. We designed our logo and chose canvas bags to be printed on. We designed a flier to present to organizations to solicit funds and a pamphlet to give away in the bags. We've gotten the cafeteria to stop using plastic water bottles and are trying to get them to switch from plastic to metal silverware. We are organizing a showing of the" Bag It" film at our local theater and we will ask for donations to help support our bag giveaway project. We'll also organize a school assembly to warn our school about the dangers of plastic. We will give away our bags with fliers on weekends in front of stores that use many plastic bags. We started on Wednesday, January 16, 2013 and have met once a week since then. We talked to the printer on February 13th to begin the process of getting bags printed. Our project will continue past March 15. We have designed pamphlets, fliers and our logo and have filmed our video. We are in the process of editing our video and uploading it to Youtube. We will show "Bag It" in our local theatre. Since most of our project's impact will be in the future, we have not yet seen its final result. However, at our school we have eliminated plastic bottles in our cafeteria since January 22nd and we estimate we have reduced plastic bottles by over 5,000. By showing the "Bag It" video in the 5th and 6th grade classrooms we have had an impact on many individual students and their families. We have had several field trips following Boyle Creek learning about our water course. Along the way we have collected bags of garbage so they will not clutter our oceans. Many students bring in their own refillable water bottles. http://youtu.be/5dgd_C4q2tA
Our primary goal is to get twenty restaurants in our neighborhood to either go straw-less or switch to paper straws. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEz1vaA0sTA&feature=youtu.be sfs.jpg mcd.jpg
