AP Biology and Freshmen Biology performed a school-wide “trash audit” of what gets thrown away each day at school. The class hoped the data they brought in would raise awareness of the contribution students have towards pollution of the environment and plan how to reduce it.
Students need to wake up on the effect they have on the environment and work to reduce their waste.

Students are bad at recycling and this is what leads to the pollution of our environment. In the recent “trash audit” the results show that just in one day 75 items of recycling ended up in the trash just in classrooms. That means per year there are over 12,000 items each year that end up in the trash that could’ve been recycled. National Geographic estimates that there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in the oceans and it is still rising. We are contributing to this by throwing away plastic items, that won’t fully degrade for hundreds of years.

It is the mission of the church that we protect and take care of the Earth. God calls us to this in Numbers 35:33 “You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it.” God put us on the Earth he created and instructed us to take care of the Earth and as a Jesuit High School, we need to take action. Jesuit Pope Francis is also calling us to recognize the impact we have on the environment and how we can help. “Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production, and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.” (Laudato Si’) We need to follow the lead of the Pope and radically change the way, as a school, we handle our waste.

People often say “what we do doesn’t matter”, but this could not be farther from the truth. Every time you make the decision to go green it has more impact than you could imagine and creates a chain reaction of people deciding to go green because you made the decision to go green yourself. Everything we correctly recycle and every time we make Earth conscience decision we improve the quality of our environments.

Students need to realize that our waste is out of control and it is hurting the environment and they also need to be better about their waste. Joining the Sustainability Club is a good start and also doing things such as reusing water bottles, correctly throwing trash where it belongs, and using less single-use plastics.