During a recycling center tour, North Whitfield Middle School students learned that up to 22,000 plastic bottles could be compressed into one bale. Bottles can be recycled into new products like packaging, benches, clothing, and even carpet. Pictured are (from left) Michael Foxx, Materials Recovery Facility operations manager for the Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Authority, with students Ansley Byers, Tristyn Curry, Emma Quarles, Odaliz Valdez, Brissa Alvarado, Connor Priest, and Mason Cross.
photo by Mitch Talley
Standing in front of a mound of trash waiting to be separated at the recycling center are North Whitfield Middle School’s (from left) Lane Headrick, Luke Reed, Titus Underwood, Brady Day, and Holly Poe.
photo by Mitch Talley
From left, Mason Cross, Liz Paez, Jenny Quazada, Titus Underwood and Jacob Chumley of North Whitfield Middle School are shown with a huge bale of recyclable plastic bottles as they tour the recycling center at the Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Management Authority. Georgia is the second largest recycling manufacturing market in the country.
photo by Mitch Talley
North Whitfield Middle School’s Cayman Lankford and Jillian Poe do their part to spread the recycling message during a tour of the Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Management Authority facility. Students learned that an aluminum can, if recycled, can be back on the shelf in 30 to 90 days rather than wasting space in the landfill. North Whitfield Middle School has a recycling receptacle for plastic/aluminum and paper products.
photo by Mitch Talley
Student 1: Can’t we just throw the trash into the sun and incinerate it?
Student 2: How would you get it up there?
Student 1: Rockets!
Student 2: So we could have a garbage rocket?
Student 1: Yes!
Student 2: And shoot it? Of course, you do know how far away the sun is?
Student 1: Yes, but it would be worth the money.
Student 2: But the rocket would blow up and $10 million would go down the drain!
Yes, we know their ideas might sound a little outrageous, but we’re still glad to see these seventh graders at North Whitfield Middle School thinking outside the box.
As the county’s director of communications, my job is to share information with the public about what your county government is doing. This year, I’ve tried to help the good folks at the Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Authority spread their anti-litter message, a task that led me to a seventh-grade classroom at North Whitfield Middle School late in the school year.
I had heard that one of North Whitfield’s teachers, Jill Ryerson, had made it a personal mission to stamp out as much litter as she could, but we didn’t realize just how passionate she was about this cause.
Turns out she’s always had a soft spot in her heart for the environment that dates back to the 1970s when, as a child, she saw the famous “Crying Indian” anti-litter public service announcements for Keep America Beautiful, featuring Native American Iron Eyes Cody. If you’re old enough, you probably remember the commercial, too, in which an Indian starts crying when someone callously throws out litter at his feet.
Mrs. Ryerson’s students didn’t know about that commercial, so she took it upon herself to show it to them.
That’s sort of the way she operates – always willing to take advantage of a “teaching moment” to get her message across. For example, listen to this story about the time she singlehandedly brought down a car full of litterers, but beware, it’s definitely one of those “don’t try this at home” situations.
“I don’t recommend this anymore because some people are crazy,” she warned. “Anyway, I came to a red light one day, and the car in front of me took all of their fast food trash and set it out – just opened the door and set it out while we were waiting for the light to change. So I got out of my car, went and picked up the bag, and said, ‘Uh, I think you dropped your food,’ and I handed them their trash back. They really didn’t say anything, but they didn’t throw it out again!”
That may be what it will take ever to win this war against litter – a combination of education, passion, friendliness, and persistence.
A great example came recently when – after years of trying – Mrs. Ryerson finally convinced a fellow teacher to stop littering and start recycling. He is such a convert now that he wrote the following story about how he broke his old habit.
“In the past, I would buy a Mountain Dew at the store on my way to work every morning. After I would drink it, I would roll down my window and toss it out on the side of the road. If I had other bottles accumulated in my truck, I would toss those out too.
“When I came to North Whitfield, I was throwing my empty bottles from what I drank while at school in the garbage. A teacher spoke several times to me about what I was doing. She explained why I should not throw my bottles out the window. Eventually, I thought about the consequences of what I was doing and how it affected the environment around me. I began to put my bottles in a recycling bin here at the school.
“If not for the words of a teacher here at North Whitfield, I would still be tossing my bottles out the window and/or in the garbage. Often times, when a person does this, it is because there are not enough recycling bins available.”
Mrs. Ryerson’s message has also rubbed off on her students.
“Y’all don’t litter, do you?” I asked them, getting a negative response from the whole class.
“No, they’ll even help pick it up,” Mrs. Ryerson said. “When we go outside to eat, they’ll bring in more trash they see. They’ll say it may not be theirs, but they’ll pick up any trash they see on the ground instead of just their own.”
I told the students how city and county crews work continuously to pick up litter along local roads, but it’s a war they just can’t seem to win, no matter how hard they work.
Fortunately, they do get help from people like Mrs. Ryerson, who frequently picks up litter and tosses it in a bag whenever she’s out walking. She encourages her students to do the same, and in fact she says the school usually has a group that helps with the Prater’s Mill and River’s Alive cleanups and Y Club beautification projects. It’s not uncommon, she says, to find radiators, refrigerators, and washers dumped off the bridge into the creek below.
“Is anyone involved with picking up litter in their neighborhood?” Mrs. Ryerson asked her class.
“When I’m running, I pick it up and carry it till I can find a trash can,” one boy answers.
“Or like at Food Lion when a plastic bag blows across your foot?” Mrs. Ryerson says.
“I have that happen so many times,” another student admits.
“Do you pick it up?” the teacher asks.
“Yes,” he says.
“My dog chases the bags,” another student interjects.
“In Germany, they don’t have plastic bags,” Mrs. Ryerson explains.
“Can’t we just throw the trash into the sun and incinerate it?” a student asks.
And well, you’ve heard the rest of that story.
One of the students asked me if I take pictures of people littering.
“No,” I answer, “but I have taken pictures of the results afterwards.”
“I would take pictures of people littering – I’d let the world know who did it,” the student says.
Indeed, some believe it might not be a bad idea to set up cameras on certain roads where littering seems to be the biggest problem, places like, say, Parrott Road.
“With a GoPro camera,” Mrs. Ryerson says.
“And then you get their license plate and start writing tickets,” a student suggests.
“I think that’s why garbage is in the same places over and over - because that’s their way to work or home,” Mrs. Ryerson theorizes, “and they have a habit every day of stopping to get something to eat or drink and then throw it out. I bet you it’s the same people doing it every day. If you stop these certain people from doing it, it would decrease.”
That’s when one student said: “I’m just trying to think of a way to get rid of trash forever.”
“You might be the next person to think of a new invention,” Mrs. Ryerson said.
“Yeah, just throw it in a black hole, and it’d be gone forever,” another student said.
“We just need to try to create one of those.”
“But you could destroy the world! Black holes grow – they eat everything.”
“We have a sinkhole at my neighbor’s, and it ate their trash.”
“But if you put it in sinkholes, it gets into the water table.”
“Throw it in a volcano?”
“They’ll come up with a solution one day,” Mrs. Ryerson finally concludes.
I just love listening to these kids, and how their train of thought advances from one area to another – from black holes all the way to volcanos!
Such a creative approach to solving a problem is a great way to tackle it, however.
Let’s listen to these students again.
“They should make it a contest,” one said. “Every year whoever picks up the most litter gets a thousand dollars! That would get people to pick up litter.”
“Or we could just have a bunch of people stand along the road, and then they would see you litter and report you,” another said.
"Or go to Parrott Road and hold up signs,” Mrs. Ryerson says.
She says over the past 22 years of teaching, she’s shown kids “how just the little bit we do can make a difference. If we all just do one piece, then we make a difference.”
She took her class to the local landfill to learn more about recycling, and when they got back, they handed out flyers to the parents in the car rider line, giving them statistics about recycling and how they can help.
Caring or noticing litter is vital.
“It’s too easy to drive past and overlook litter,” Mrs. Ryerson says.
I tell her that some folks litter because they think they’re giving other people a job.
“That’s ridiculous,” she says.
“It would be neat to do a survey here to see how many people litter because that was one of the things I told the teacher who’s not littering anymore,” Mrs. Ryerson says. “That’s what you want your sons to do? That’s the world you want for their kids? That’s the example you want to set for your children and their children?
“It made him think about it. That’s all. He never had thought about it, so when you tell him what if everyone did that, what would our county look like?”
One more thing: Mrs. Ryerson’s theory about stopping a certain few same people from littering has its merit. Liz Swafford at the Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Authority says that researchers have indeed found it’s only a small percentage of folks who actually litter. If we can ever convince that messy minority to do the right thing, then maybe there is hope for licking the litter situation.
With the help of folks like Mrs. Ryerson and her class, the future looks brighter.
“These kids care about a lot more things than I did when I was younger,” she says. “They’ll pick up litter – I see good things from our kids.”