An Object Lesson in Bag Waste For New Jersey Students

One million paper clips, a mol of pennies — it’s hard to really comprehend what a large number looks like until you see it in a jar or all lined up, which is what makes these grade school object lessons so fun. But what would five hundred plastic bags look like? Well, they probably wouldn’t look like much of anything at all if crammed and wadded into a ball. But how about tied together all in a line? Surely a mere five hundred wouldn’t be such a sight to behold, could it? This is the question that Madison, New Jersey’s Central Avenue School set out to tackle, and the answers may surprise you.

What would it look like if 504 plastic bags – one per student at Madison’s grades K-6 Central Avenue School – were tied together and stretched out across the school’s lawn? That’s what kindergartners through sixth graders at the school decided to discover on the morning of Monday, April 14, in honor of Earth Day.

With the help of the school’s Green Group club, the students made chains of plastic bags in their classrooms, and then gathered outside to tie them together.

The result: The bags stretched from the front door of the school to Central Avenue, and back – two and one-half times.

“This is how little things add up,” Principal Philip Kennedy told the assembled students.

Principal Kennedy followed up the lesson with a listed sermon of why plastic bags are a danger to the environment and how the correct answer to “paper or plastic?” is “neither,” but the message was abundantly clear from the start: one little plastic bag may seem inconsequential, but all little things add up and can become overwhelming astonishingly fast. (Because, really, what are five hundred bags? Fifty families’ grocery lists, at best?) The principal also stressed the importance and usefulness of reusable bags for grocery shopping, a concept that some children seemed already familiar with and eager to implement:

“My mother sometimes forgets to bring our reusable bags to the store,” allowed student Libby Johnson, a member of the school’s Green Group.

“But I’m going to remind her now.”

As icing on the environmental cake, Whole Foods Market stepped in and donated five hundred reusable shopping bags to Central Avenue School, one for every student and just a bit of an upgrade from the ones with which they walked in.

Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under Happenings, The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.