INDIANAPOLIS — At the June 24 Indianapolis Public Schools Board of School Commissioners action session, the Board voted to approve a new district-wide recycling program.
The recycling provider, chosen out of a competitive bid process, is Waste Management of Indiana, who successfully performs waste removal for IPS and already provides recycling services at more than fourteen IPS schools under their current contract.
To help each IPS location understand the impact of their recycling, Waste Management will provide monthly reports on how much was recycled and what the savings add up to. For example, an April 2014 report for one IPS location currently recycling noted monthly savings of 153 gallons of oil (enough to heat and cool a home for a full year), 36 gallons of gasoline (enough to drive 995 miles), and 20 mature trees (equivalent to 250,938 sheets of newspaper), among other statistics. Having these numbers to show to students means a great opportunity to tie their recycling actions to real-world results, a great opportunity to teach them about the change they are helping make.
Waste Management will provide recycling bins, large collection toters, and outdoor, lockable recycling containers for all locations, and they are using a single-stream process, meaning schools will not be required to separate recyclables into categories, such as paper, plastic, glass, etc. Rather all recyclables will go into a single bin.