Recycling Heaven

Who doesn't love the smell of old recycling stench on a Saturday morning?! I certainly do. The smell of crusty soda cans and slimy beer bottles not only smells like support for the Funk Band, it smells like we are helping the environment.

Instead of sleeping in and being lazy while basically creating more trash and wasting more electricity by sitting on the couch watching TV and eating potato chips, I got up early and went to support my band members by loading my car with recyclables. I even solicited some donations from my Girl Scout leader Maggie.

At first when I asked her on the phone, I thought she was exaggerating or making a joke. But when I walked up the stairs and finally saw the walkway to her corner apartment, I realized I didn't need my empty Volvo station wagon, I needed a semi. She told me to bring some help with me, so I brought my father along. I was able to fill my car completely, drop it off at the school, go back for another completely full car load and she still had about a third of what she had in the beginning crowding her front door.

So I definitely want to take time out of this blog to give a shout out to Maggie and say THANK YOU from the Funk Band!

As soon as I got back with the second load, we all got down and dirty and were able to bag up 40 full garbage bags ready for pickup in about an hour. I was very proud of our work. Especially considering how far we've come since our first recycling Saturday. We were all here today and all prepared to work hard.

I hope we can put this money toward getting more of our super-cool t-shirts. We have started selling our Funk Band t-shirts for 15 dollars and I think we are doing really well. People like them so much they are even starting to take sizes that they didn't ask for. Also, the bamboo-t-shirts are a huge hit. I think we have sold out of most of them.


I would definitely want more t-shirts because seeing everyone wearing them around the school makes me smile. We have accomplished many great things with these t-shirts. We have started a wave of school pride, we have promoted the funk band and we have done all this in a completely environmentally friendly way by raising the money with recyclables and using eco-friendly materials for the t-shirts. Which I think is very cool. So contact any funk band member if you want one!

I'm off,
Claire

A Day of Recycling

Today we recycled to raise money for our t-shirts that we ordered. We made a nice design out of our rock etude #9 and it is really cool. It is a black t-shirt with the rock etude written in white and the shirts are made out of either organic cotton or organic cotton and bamboo. It is so soft compared to a regular t-shirt. Mr. Zorn surprised us with them the night we finished our studio recordings. We each got a shirt - everybody took the bamboo because they were 2 times softer than the all-cotton ones. The thing that is really cool is that when you wash it won't fade like regular t-shirts. And we are selling them for only $15 compared to $45.


Today we made 36 something bags of plastics, cans and bottles. It took us about an hour and a half. I wish that people wouldn't be so lazy. They put all of the breakfast foods and trash in the recycling bins, even when the trash can is 2 or 3 steps away. We found a hot dog on a stick (that they serve for breakfast) in the recycling bin. Disgusting! And people waste so much water, soda and juice - we found a bunch of water bottles, soda bottles and a gatorade bottle all still full!

We were so good - we got through the recycling really fast. There was a lot more compared to last month's load and we finished in about the same amount of time. We all knew what we had to do and how to do it. For example, I would go get all of the recycle bins throughout the campus and dump them all into the main pile with everything else. Claire, Tem, Melissa and Max would start sorting the recyclables into all of the trash bags and Micah would wash out all of the bins that I would bring to him. He would spray it all down with the hose in the back of the cafeteria and it is disgusting what comes out of those bins. Once Micah and I are done with our part we go help everyone else with bagging everything. We put the bags in three bins - one for cans, one for plastic and one for bottles. We keep throwing everything from the big pile into the bins and when they get full, we change the bags. That is just basically what we do and the faster we do it the more time we have to chill and relax - and just wait for the truck to show up and take all the bags.

So that's what we did today!
C ya later.
Kule'a