It’s hard to take a stroll through the Mountlake Terrace campus and not notice the litter strewn over the sidewalks and asphalt, let alone the weeds and debris overrunning the natural environment. Indeed, the issue affects all corners of the globe as new information about pollution, littering, and waste pop up on internet feeds. In the face of these issues, students in the Eco Club are actively working to make a change.
Eco Club helps to coordinate student actions and improve the local environment, all while spreading awareness of their cause. As senior and Eco Club president Emslie Kenall describes it, Eco Club is “a club where we’re basically trying to improve our school’s interaction with the environment. Currently this includes trying to implement recycling into [Terrace], because it hasn’t been happening.”
Eco Club’s efforts have been an uphill battle following the 2020 school closure due to COVID-19.
“After COVID, you know, it kind of went away,” Kenall said. “I think it was [my] sophomore year when there were quite a few people still in the club, but they were all seniors. It’s been a club for a long time, it just kind of hit a hard spot after COVID.”
After this dip in productivity during COVID, Eco Club has taken on several new projects and efforts. Eco Club has taken on a new campaign promoting recycling, advertising it through recycling posters throughout the hallways and classroom walls. Newly introduced recycling boxes have been slowly creeping their way into Terrace classrooms, providing a clear way to recycle the school’s most used resource: paper. “We wanted to get a box for paper only because that’s the main thing being wasted,” Kenall said.
According to CalRecycle, paper accounts for over 31.3% of schools’ overall waste. Further, it claims that while 80% of school waste is recyclable, just 20% ends up in the recycling bin, filling up landfills with waste that could have been recycled.
At MTHS, recycling bins are present in classrooms, but the contents of those bins get thrown in the dumpster along with food waste and classroom garbage.
Because these materials have been contaminated, items like paper and cardboard become non-recyclable. This is where Eco Club comes in.
“[The paper recycling boxes are] in like 10 classrooms now, but we’re going to try and put it in almost every classroom so that it’s easier. I think the issue is that recycling has been getting mixed up with [things] like food, so this way it will be more clear that just paper goes in here,” Kenall said. With one semester left at Terrace, Kenall’s goal has been to build a better recycling program. “That’s been an ongoing issue in our school and especially in our district and I think it would be really nice if I could leave the school and have a start to a system for that,” Kenall said.
Along with the recycling boxes, Eco Club has organized school-wide clean-ups. “We typically work with Key Club and National Honor Society (NHS) because they have a lot of people in their clubs,” Kenall said. “Because we’re so small and we meet on Thursdays, which kind of conflicts with TSA, we reach out to Key Club and NHS and try and get them to spread the word, and then we usually do it on a Wednesday to get more people.” These cleanups focus on outdoor student spaces and litter cleanup. “There’s almost always trash everywhere so I think when we’re able to pick it up, it’s nice for everyone,” Kenall said.
“I found an orange, a peeled orange, over there. Someone just bit into it and left it,” senior and Eco Club Secretary Elizabeth Carlson said, commenting on the waste found around Terrace. “Just so you know, when I found the orange, I picked all of it up, so that’s new.”
Eco Club also stewards Terrace’s lesser-known Naturescape and flagpole island at the front of the school.