Students launch paper recycling campaign
By Ken Powers Community Reporter
Northborough/Southborough - Algonquin Regional High School's (ARHS) official colors are maroon and gold, but since September 2007 seniors Katie Craig, Jaynelle Bellemore and Sam Spiewak have urged fellow students, as well as faculty and staff , to "Get into the Green Scene."

KEN POWERS ARHS students (l to r) Katie Craig, Sam Spiewak and Jaynelle Bellemore recycle paper throughout the school as part of a marketing class project.

"We needed to come up with a project for our marketing research class and we figured recycling would be something that would not only be easy to track and document, but we'd be helping the environment in the process," Craig said. "We've really been surprised by how much people who have gotten involved."

The trio's project, "Get into the Green Scene," urges not only students, faculty and staff at ARHS to recycle paper, but the public as well.

"It's community-wide," Bellemore said. "Our primary focus is recycling within the school, but we're also urging students and teachers to bring stuff in from home - newspapers, magazines, junk mail - and recycle it here."

The students' reason for stressing recycling from Northborough and Southborough residents as well as the school community is two-fold. The need to recycle and be environmentally friendly is first and foremost, but the school receives $15 for every six tons of paper it recycles from the company that owns the dumpsters, Abitibi Paper Retriever.

"We can then take that money and buy heifers from the Heifer Project or we can send it as a donation to a Third World country," Craig said.

The results of the girls' recycling project will not only serve as their marketing research class project, but will also be entered in the state competition of the DECA state conference to be held March 13 to 15 in Boston.

In an effort to get out the message that there is a renewed recycling eff ort in the school, Craig, Bellemore and Spiewak have made and hung posters throughout the school stressing the need to recycle and have had the recycling efforts regularly announced on the school's public address system in the morning and afternoon.

"As for notifying the public, we've created a public service announcement that we've sent around to various radio stations throughout Central Mass.," Spiewak said. "We're also going to get with a communications class and make a commercial that will air locally on channel 13."

The girls began their project in September 2007 and said they have seen a steady increase in recycling since they began.

"It started slow, but I think now people are thinking about it more often," Bellemore said. "Plus we've made it as easy as we can, with bins in every classroom."

The girls have a set Monday Wednesday-Friday schedule, visiting diff erent parts of the building, hallways and classes on diff erent days, so that every room's recycling bin is emptied at least once a week.

"The bins get really heavy," Spiewak said. "We're really building up our muscles with this project."

The level of interest from their fellow students has surprised the trio.

"The amount of recycling and the amount of people recycling has been amazing," Craig said. "We thought it was going to be a fun way to get out of class and walk around. We didn't realize there would be this much work involved, and it's very time consuming, too."