wide-eyed

Is the New York City school recycling bin half empty or half full?

Councilmember’s Bill DeBlasio’s office introduced a bill calling for recycling in NYC schools (purposefully redundant since it’s unpracticed city law) and legislation requiring the Department of Education provide schools with recycling bins in June 2008. Teachers from around NYC brought over 200 students to City Hall in support of the hearing around the bill and legislation. Education Tomorrow’s Micki Josi and her students spoke out at the rally. A sixth grade student explained how he’s been taking his school’s paper recycling home because he couldn’t stomach it being trashed.

During the hearing, council members drilled the Departments of Sanitation and Education about the lack of recycling in schools. Jeff Shears, Chief of Staff for the DOE’s Office of Finance and Administration, was told at one point that if he were working for council member and Education Chair Robert Jackson, he’d be fired. He couldn’t answer a simple question: who is responsible for recycling in schools?

According to the Chancellor’s Regulations on Waste Management, it’s the principal. Yet, the vast majority principals haven’t prioritized it enough to even initiate programs and some have discouraged teachers who have tried.

As the bill and legislation gestate before a vote, the DOS and DOE have been given time to demonstrate their commitment, which they’re doing. Not like a valiant boyfriend professing his undying love, but more like one that’s tripped up so many times he’s trying to get some footing with a sound effort or two.

During the hearing, Shears was asked to produce names of the 372 recycling coordinators he purported having. Now he should be able to produce one for each of NYC’s more than 2,000 public schools.

For the first time ever, principals were required to submit the name of their school’s recycling coordinator by September 17, 2008. The position is unpaid and therefore didn’t require posting. Principals handpicked coordinators and staff may not know who was chosen, or that this new required position even exists.

There’s new energy around recycling in some schools, but coordinators are wringing their hands because starting a recycling program in a school that’s never successfully recycled is no small task. And the DOE is providing no training, nor are they training custodians who have been frequently at odds with recycling programs. Tackling the job as a volunteer isn’t always appealing—in one school, no one would take the job so the principal submitted her name. How effective and sustainable will this approach be?

Appointed recycling coordinators were required to create a recycling plan or sign a pre-fabricated one and submit a confirmation of having put it “on file” at school by October 1, 2008. The DOE acted swiftly with early-in-the-year deadlines, but how useful will thrown-together or stock plans be? Don’t effective plans come out of planning and environmental or recycling committee meetings with school-wide input?

The names of school recycling coordinators and their plans aren’t made public, so what will the next step for accountability be? Are these laudable first steps toward realizing effective recycling programs in all schools, or is it a way for the DOE to say they’ve done their part now it’s up to schools to do the rest? Like procuring bins. Right now, the DOE won’t provide bins, saying trash cans should be labeled as recycling bins—a naïve response that assumes there are extra trash bins, and that while our lessons must be consistently clear and explicit, our new recycling campaign needn’t be.

Over the summer, Educating Tomorrow spoke with the DOE about the importance of forming an advisory board to be part of the Chancellor’s Regulations on Waste Management revision process. This would bring all key players, such as the DOS and DOE, and the teacher’s, principal’s, custodial engineer’s and cleaner’s unions together to establish interagency best management practices. Yet one day in September, the new regulations were up and school recycling coordinators weren’t even notified. Again, a missed opportunity for communication, collaboration and success.

We also noticed the DOE now has a page up about recycling, albeit spelled wrong. We’re not too concerned by the missing “c”, but we are concerned coordinators may not know it’s there and don’t know who to turn to for help. Apparently, the more visible DOS Golden Apple Awards has received so many phone calls from new coordinators they’ve had to hire additional help.

The DOE has hired additional help to work on recycling, although we’re uncertain how they were hired or repositioned, what the new employee structure is (who’s responsible for what), and how long-term their position is. For example, one title is Special Assistant to the Integrated Service Center.

There are changes being made. We could just say the trash bin is completely full—half with paper and half with non-recyclable trash. Many of us don’t have recycling bins, and if we did, they’d be full of paper, some misplaced trash, and the air of good doing.