Personal Project Update

For my personal project, expanding the recycling program at my old high school, I have definitely made some progress.  When going into the project, I knew that they only recycled paper products, and that was it.  I had the idea that I wanted to encourage them to expand the program to include plastic bottles, which seemed like the logical step because of the fact that all of the vending machines in the school sell drink products in plastic bottles. 

You know... Like these.

Or they could re-use them and make a house!

So that is the overall goal of my project.
I've spoken with the head of the recycle program (a teacher) a few times, and presented some ideas to him about why recycling plastic bottles is beneficial and also about how to go about doing that, and he seemed to really like the idea.  He said that he has been considering the expansion of the recycling program for some time, and would really like my help with it.  Going forward, I'm going to begin researching types of bins that would be feasible for the school to use, and we are going to also look into locations for the recycle bins. 

I'm not going to lie, these look awesome.  And I'd totally throw my bottles into them.

I'm also toying with the idea of suggesting a student-led Recycle Team that would help with the recycling.  Currently, the recycling is only happening at the high school, because he doesn't have the time to go over to the elementary schools and collect the bins.  I think something like that would be out of the scope of my Personal Project, because it would take a lot of time and planning, but I might still get his thoughts on something like that, because not only would it promote student involvement, but also education about recycling, and make it more feasible to expand recycling to the elementary schools.