Green Team switches school to recyclable paper

Seniors Amanda Li (left) and Kailin Lu collect paper as a part of Green Team’s recycling program.

The Green Team is financing a subsidy that has enabled the school to start using 30 percent recycled paper. Science teacher Greg Stoehr, the club’s adviser, presented the idea in a meeting with Principal Wynne Satterwhite, and the administration has agreed to switch the entire school’s copying to the recycled paper.

The Green Team’s original plan was to switch the teachers’ copying paper to 100 percent recycled paper. After meeting with Satterwhite and determining that the comparative costs of 30 percent recycled paper and normal paper were “pretty similar,” the decision was made to purchase and implement 30 percent recycled paper for all of the school’s copying purposes, which is millions of pages per year.

The paper, Boise ASPEN® 30, is 30 percent post-consumer recycled material that is designed to perform as well as standard, non-recycled paper. The slightly higher price will be offset by Green Team’s recycling drive of printer cartridges.

“We can’t buy enough paper for the entire school’s copying, but we’re trying to subsidize the teacher paper that they use in the personal copiers in their classrooms,” Stoehr said.

According to Green Team Publicity Officer junior Cynthia Wang, Stoehr proposed the idea to the club after finding a “great vendor” that sold high-quality recycled paper.

“He showed [the club], and everyone was amazed by the quality of the paper,” Cynthia said. “There are some general perceptions about recycled paper. People always think there’s leaves in there, but it actually looked really nice, and there’s no harmful chemicals involved in the bleaching process.”

One of the subjects mentioned at the past MVLA Green Schools Summit was “closing the gap” of recycling. To Cynthia, this manifests in the new paper program.

“The point of recycling is so you can actually reuse the stuff that has been recycled, and buy them so that there’s actually a cycle going on,” Cynthia said. “If you just keep recycling and you don’t make the products out of recycled goods, or if you don’t buy those recycled goods, then there’s no point …. The idea is that we would actually close that gap by using recycled paper.”

Cynthia stressed the monetary restrictions on such a plan but has high hopes for the future.

“We are a very optimistic group when it comes to these things,” Cynthia said.