Local teacher Emily Huddleston helped her students tap into an unexpected resource to motivate environmental awareness and ecological change: plastic.
Huddleston, a special education teacher at Fisk Elementary School in 2021-22, says the idea originated in her desire to teach her students about Earth Day in a practical and relatable manner.
“I wanted to make a more significant impact and let them feel that impact as well,” Huddleston said.
Her idea was to see how many pounds of recyclable plastic her students could collect in a span of two weeks. The idea quickly became a school-wide initiative that grew beyond her expectations.
“They really stepped up,” she said. “They got 110 pounds of plastic, and that’s kindergarten through eighth grade.”
Part of the incentive was for every bit of plastic brought in, the students got a hole in a punch card. When the punch card was full, the student received a free soda.
“On the first day, I had second graders bringing in full trash bags.”
“I was getting emails from parents saying, ‘My kids have gone all over the house looking for any possible plastic that we had,’” she said.
“We kept the bags in my room, so we had about nine bags in the 55 gallon size,” she said.
“When my kids saw all these bags piling up, they said, ‘When are you going to get rid of this?’”
She took the bags to the Poplar Bluff Recycling Center, which is operated by Ozark Foothills Regional Planning Commission.
“I teach middle school special education, so I was trying to teach my kids the importance of recycling in a way that they could make it a responsibility for them,” Huddleston said, “but also to understand their importance in participating in recycling, reusing, and repurposing items that they could throw away.”
“My kids were excited to be the front runners for all of this,” she said. Her students passed out the punch cards to classes as well as collecting plastic.
“They were they were excited to be the starters for the for this program,” she said.
“I worked mainly with about ten seventh graders,” she said. “We did math to figure out how much plastic they would use or how much they would cut out if their family all stopped drinking water bottles.”
Huddleston cited PepsiCo Recycling as a good resource for educational information.
“They had a video showing kids that it’s actually cheaper for companies to recycle instead of creating plastic,” she said.
“We did a carbon footprint to see how many earths that we would have to have if everyone acted like we did, and that was really surprising for them,” Huddleston said. “I think they didn’t realize the size of their effect.
“You have more of an effect than you think you do, and I tried to show my kids that as well.”
Huddleston did speak to her principal at Fisk about starting an ongoing recycling program, but for her, she is moving to O’Neal Elementary in Poplar Bluff starting this fall.
“We had considered making it a permanent Earth Day celebration at Fisk,” she said.
“I definitely want to do it next year at my next school. Hopefully I’ll get my foot in the door and be able to start some sort of program like that.”