Everyone thinks that recycling is a fun and easy way to get kids involved in the green movement..... Guess again. United's recycling program has been a work in progress. The first thing we learned was that schools are a major waste producer - and I mean major. The issue that we faced right out of the gate was storage. What are we going to do with tons of paper products and plastics? The sheer volume alone was staggering. We researched every possible solution. First we tried to go through the county. Indiana County has a much too limited program to handle our needs. Next, we thought about building a storage complex - but the overall costs and the involvement needed from the state and school district was overwhelming. Our next plan was to look at outside vendors to see if they could provide recycling bins and transortation. No luck- we are too remote. But we got lucky... We constructed a plan with the Recycling Center and Krise Transportation (Krise is our school bus provider). The county is supplying us with huge cardboard boxes to store the recyleable waste and Krise is transporting the material to the Recycling Center in Homer City. What an incredible partnership for us. Since November, we have recycled over 4000 pounds of paper products. We are starting with plastics next week.
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