Life & Style

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Students bag honours for recycling zeal

Plastics remade into Frisbees

By: Kevin Rollason

Posted: 01/9/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

That plastic bag you were going to throw out could now be a hard plastic disk flying towards your head.

Thanks to students at 71 schools -- and Take Pride Winnipeg -- about 200,000 plastic grocery bags have now been turned into Frisbees.

And Take Pride's Tom Ethans says the 10 schools who collected the most bags have been awarded park benches constructed from plastic recycled from bags.

Ethans said each of the 71 schools also receive 50 Frisbees apiece produced from the bags.

The Frisbees are grey and when you hold them towards a light you can easily see the different colours from the plastic that used to be part of a bag. They were produced by Wham-O, the original maker of Frisbees.

The 270 nursery to Grade 6 students at Mulvey School were the top gatherers of plastic bags with 10,641. They were followed by other schools including Riverview School, Elwick Community School, Grosvenor School, École Assiniboine, and Lord Roberts School.

Mulvey Principal Peter Correia said the students -- and the community surrounding the school -- all joined in to help.

"We put it up on our sign outside and we had people from the community bringing bags in," Correia said.

"We had so many that they were knee-deep in half a classroom. The students were so excited."

Correia said he was proud of the role the special needs students at the school took, including Michael Harrison and Kiera Romaniuk, who led the effort to tally the number of bags.

Both seven-year-old Harrison and Romaniuk smiled broadly when asked if they liked counting the bags.

Grade 6 students Nick McIvor and Dui Santos, both 11, said they collected most of their bags at home.

"It was easy -- we have lots of bags," Santos said.

"I brought in a pile of bags," McIvor said.

Ethans said it's great that about 200,000 plastic bags were diverted from the garbage dump and turned into something else.

"The students really felt they were making a difference," he said.

"This is the second year of the program and we're getting more and more schools involved."

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 9, 2010 B3

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