Battle Ground High School students weave and tie cut strips of plastic into long balled up strands which will later be used to crochet mats. This is called “plarning.”
Battle Ground High School’s Center Based Classroom program offers special needs students with opportunities in vocational training as well as educational experience in social skills in and out of the classroom.
Since 2015, Battle Ground teachers Mike Strever, a special education teacher, and Teri Koskiniemi, a special education job coach, have overseen a recycling program targeting the donation of certain types of plastics to a company called Trex, where they are melted and molded into products like benches or picture frames or even outdoor decks.
Every year, between the months of November and April, various school and community groups nationwide compete to see who can collect the most plastics for donation. Trex provides the schools with signs detailing the types of plastics accepted and boxes to collect the donations. Together, the teachers and students weigh the donated plastic, totalling the weight of their collection at the end of the competition which falls every year on Earth Day.
In the 2015-16 school year, Battle Ground High School’s CBC group collected 1,342 pounds of plastic and in the 2016-17 school year, they collected 1,868 pounds.
This most recent school year, the 2017-18 BHS CBC students blew those numbers away by collecting 3,143 pounds of plastic, which placed them 8th out of the 607 participants in the nation.
This year’s top ten ranking earned them a bench made of this recycled material, now located in one of the classroom hallways of the school, along with a bird feeder and a planter, both donated by CBC to other departments in the school.
The accomplishment is not only exciting the students in their achievement, but is motivating them and their teachers to work harder and collect more.
The plastic bags most common in these donations take decades to decompose and as a result end up almost permanently in our landfill. Companies like Trex offer alternative uses for these materials and ways to keep our environment clean. With mass quantities of bags coming in, not always accepted at the designated drop off sites, students in the CBC program have found other creative ways to reuse and recycle. When they aren’t at their job sites, students do what is called plarning: the weaving or tying together of cut strips of plastic into long balled up strands later used to crochet mats. These mats are then donated to a local ministry which hands them out to homeless men and women in the area. With another year under their belt, Battle Ground High School’s CBC program is ready to collect more, to donate more, and to plarn more, decreasing the waste in landfills and providing for the homeless community. Details on the Trex recycling project and the materials accepted can be found at Trex
Recycling’s website, trex.com/
recycling/recycling-programs, and donations are encouraged and welcomed to the main office at Battle Ground High School.
Editor’s note: Emerson Loudenback is a intern reporter for The Reflector. She is a graduate of Cedar Tree Classical Christian School in Ridgefield and a current student of Lipscomb University in Tennessee where she is majoring in English with a minor in Psychology.
