Recycling Aluminum Cans, Ink Cartridges, and Cell Phones

Wow, what an awesome month! Before I talk about the success of my project I first want to Thank Everyone who helped out. Leadership Academy students, you really stepped it up and showed some amazing results throughout this project! Both myself and Mr. Engels are very proud of you!

Ok, so let's recap and talk about the last month.

My project started out with one simple idea that came from a poster I saw. This poster was hanging up in the Minocqua bowling alley and talked about recycling cans. This really caught my eye and I started to do some research on the idea. One idea turned into many and what I came up with was to collect and recycle aluminum cans, old cell phones, and old ink cartridges.

To encourage students to participate we developed a little competition. I divided the students up into two teams. Each team was decided by the students' ages...that way both teams had an even number of adults, five year olds and so forth. The incentive for bringing in their cell phones, ink cartridges, and cans was a free pizza party for the team who brought in the most stuff. Also, we gave out a $25 gift certificate for the pro shop to the person who brought in the most stuff.

At first people didn't bring in a whole lot of stuff, but with in the second week the phones, cartridges and cans started to roll in! I had everyone give me their items directly. I would count what they had and then put their points up on the Team poster. A cell phone was worth one point, a ink cartridges was worth one point, and 100 cans was worth one point.

At the end of the project I added everything up. I wanted to really make a point of showing the students and the community what a group of people could do in only one month's time when they take action.

Here are the final totals..............

83 Cell phones, 136 Ink Cartridges, and 11,265 aluminum cans!

One cell phone pollutes 132,000 liters of water. 83 X 132,000 = 10,956,000 liters of water
Or if you want to look at it in gallons.... There is 0.264172052 liters in one gallon soooo
0.264172052 X 10,956,000 = 2,894,269 gallons of water.!!!

So 83 Cell phones recycled saved 2,894,269 gallons of water from being polluted!!!! Nice Job

Last weekend we had a recycling party. Students from the Academy came out to help us take the pop tops off the cans. The pop tops went to another project, developed by Alex Olewinski. He is donating pop tops to the Ronald McDonald's Houses that helps terminally ill children. Please check out Alex's post on his project.

At the recycling party we dumped all 11,265 cans onto the parking lot. We had teams set up and had each person at a station. The cans were piled on one side and a few people where in charge of taking the cans and giving them to their team mates in the middle. These people used pliers and took off the pop tops and then threw them into another pile. This pile was the finished cans...ready for recycling. We got through the cans in about 2 hours and we had about 30 people helping. (kids and adults)


We also called the news and they came out to do a story about the success we had. We will also be putting in a press release in the paper this week.

If you would like to do the same project or would like some information on it, please contact me for more information.
There are links below for companies who take cell phones and ink cartridges.

www.phoneraiser.com
www.recycleplace.com


LEADERSHIP ACADEMY STUDENTS!!!!
I do plan on collecting cell phones and ink cartridges throughout the rest of the year. This will be an on-going project and we will have a bucket at Leadership Academy where you can drop them off. Please bring in your items.

The winning team was the RED Team! Congrats!

The winner of the most items was ZACH CARLSON. Good Work Zach!

~ Nikki Engels