From trays to pots: schools get creative with recycling

Thursday, September 24, 2009

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Students put their trays in a recycling bin instead of in the trash.

MANATEE COUNTY (Bay News 9) -- While most schools toss their foam lunch trays into the garbage, two schools in Manatee County have found a new use for them.

In an effort to help save the environment while making some extra money, the schools are now turning the lunch trays into flower pots.

When students at Palmetto High School and Nolan Middle School finish their lunches, they put their trays in a recycling bin instead of in the trash.

Once the trays are collected, they are fed into a thermo-compacting machine, which melts all the trays together into a big block of plastic.

Each block is made of 800 foam trays. The blocks are then collected by Thermal Compaction Systems in Lakeland.

More Information

"We pick up blocks and take them back to the facility and crush them and turn them into flower pots," said company spokesman Bill Major

Major said each block makes between six and nine unique flower pots, which the students then sell to raise money for their schools.

The project not only benefits the students. Patrick Gallagher, the district's energy and recycling specialist, said it also helps the environment.

Purchasing Flower Pots
The flower pots are available at these schools:

Palmetto High School 941-723-4848
Nolan Middle School
(941) 751-8200

"A place like Palmetto High School, this week alone, there will be 225 less bags of garbage or 9,000 for the entire school year that don't go to landfill," he said. "Styrofoam takes 500 years to decompose."

The recycling program has also saved money for the district.

"Because we're not sending those trash bags to the landfill, we save a minimum of $6,800 a year in trash hauling expenses," Gallagher said.

The Manatee School District is the first in the nation to use the compactors for this purpose. Each machine costs $6,000, but officials say the costs are paid back within the first year.

School officials said they hope to expand the program to every school in the district sometime in the future.

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