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Candy and balloons were not the only things Berkeley High students got to sift through on Valentines Day Tuesday. A group of juniors from the School of Social Justice & Ecology (SSJE)—a small school at Berkeley High—met up with their peers at BHS to dig through the school’s trash and dissect it. 

The event “Trash Heap for Valentine’s Day,” marked the beginning of a major campaign to accelerate the level of recycling at Berkeley High.  

BHS custodians were asked to stack all the school’s trash in the center of the quad from Feb. 12-14, so that students could see what they were throwing away in three days. 

“We wanted them to say ‘eww,’ we wanted them to say ‘gross.’ We wanted them to stop and open some of these trash bags on Valentine’s Day and evaluate some of the stuff inside.,” said Kate Trimlett, lead teacher at SSJE. 

“Kids learn about the four R’s—Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rot—from third grade onwards. But they also need to learn how to use less to produce less trash than needed,” she said. 

Pointing to an apple core that came out of a trash bag, Trimlett told her group of students that the fruit was an excellent example of what should have been recycled but wasn’t. 

“There are hundreds of other things that kids throw into the trash every day that are actually compost,” she said. “We carried out a survey on students and most of them want recycling. Bottles, paper, pencils, batteries, food scraps -- the list is endless. They also want recycling bins in the courtyard.” 

Recycling bins are only in the classroom and in the food court at Berkeley High.  

BHS is also the only school in the Berkeley Unified School District to receive a grant under the Service Learning Waste Reduction Program (SLWRP) funded by Stopwaste.org, also known as the Alameda County Waste Management Authority. 

Marcy Greenhut, Berkeley High recycling coordinator for the City of Berkeley, said that awareness had been the main purpose behind this little exercise. 

“We wanted to illustrate how much waste we produce and how much of the trash could have been recycled instead of becoming landfill. People just go to Cosco and Walmart and keep on buying stuff. We need to learn how to reuse some of the things we buy,” she said. 

Greenhut told the Planet that the recycling program at Berkeley High had really picked up after principal Jim Slemp took over the administration. 

Jen Marks, a representative from the Alameda County Office of Education, said teachers often found it difficult to incorporate recycling into the curriculum. 

“But there are ways to do it,” she said. “Economics, language, math and art are all great subjects through which recycling can be taught.Teachers just need to be a little creative.” 

The entire school district is implementing mixed paper and cardboard recycling. “Thirteen out of 17 schools have been diverting food waste,” said Greenhut.  

“Instead of going into the trash, the food waste goes into biodegradable green bags which get collected by the city and transported to the compost facility. The recycled material is then brought back to the city to be used in different ways.” 

Terrence Womack, a ninth-grader at SSJE, said that he hated to see school money going to waste for not recycling. 

“BHS spends $3,500 per month on trash removal. This money could be used toward more purposeful things, such as textbooks and fieldtrips. If we don’t recycle, we could be living next to trash heaps in the future,” he said. 

A few students who were passing by the 200 plus bags of trash on Tuesday did not believe that it was generated by the students.  

Victoria Harmon, a sophomore, said that students were aware of recycling but were sometimes too lazy to carry it out. 

“Most of the time my friends would rather throw stuff on the ground,” she said. 

Kayla Miller, who was getting credits to dissect a bag of trash during her English period, said that she had found money, hair, pencils and even a condom that afternoon.  

“It’s kind of disgusting, but shameful at the same time,” she said. 

“I know we are doing really great with recycling bottles because we got three of them from two bags. But what is really sad is most of this stuff doesn’t belong in the trash. It is compost and should have been recycled.”