Do you know what goes in the trash? Exactly, trash! North Atlanta High School students have a severe lack of recycling the many important items that we all use. Items such as plastic, paper, and cans are getting shoved in a place where they don’t belong. Little to no students actually recycle their waste in their school, although, who could blame them? There is no encouragement or incentive to recycle waste at North Atlanta at all.  We may have recycling bins here, but they barely get used if they get used at all. When they do get used, however, it is treated as a more of a big trash can that you can put your full water bottle and entire Chick-fil-a bag in.

Recycling is a very important part of getting rid of waste in this world. The third word in the famous “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” slogan has created significant change in the ever increasing environmental problems of this Earth. Recycling creates less trash in the landfills and the oceans, it reduces the amount of harmful chemicals that emit from the landfills, and reduces excessive fossil fuels. Recycling has these benefits and more outside of school such as creating jobs and creating energy to power your very homes. Do you want clean air, a powered home, and less trash? Then we need to recycle our waste!

Despite the efforts of many, recycling just isn’t getting done. We have recycling bins three times as long as the regular trash bins and an environmental organization at this school called, The Environmental Club. Self-explanatory right? We have all the physical resources in order for recycling to work at our school! However, without the proper management, we only get about 5 actual plastic bottles on a good day. This is seen all the time. The full plates of food thrown away, the full bottle of water, assignment papers, and so on. All of those instances have been happening for a long time at North Atlanta High School.

We are a big school with over 2,200 students, one of the largest high schools in Atlanta and in Georgia. Plenty of students use the drink and snack vending machines, each with tons of plastic and waste when used by the students. Even though the snacks can’t be recycled, the drinking bottles/cans definitely can. This makes the issue of recycling all the more important for us. Our school’s gigantic population is creating much more waste and garbage where it doesn’t need to be. I do understand, not every single student will practice this, but I believe that this definitely needs to be practiced more.