Goodbye Plastics - get your own water bottle 2015

Clay Middle School

Goodbye Plastics - Get your own Water Bottle is a continuation of the Carmel Green Teen funded 2013 Goodbye Plastics project. While the 2013 project focused on reducing disposable plastic bags, the 2015 project highlights the importance of reducing disposable plastic water bottles.

Students wanted a way to provide a visual display of how many disposable plastic water bottles were used at school, so they set up box for students and staff to donate their used disposable plastic water bottles.

With the 400+ disposable water bottles collected, students spelled out "Goodbye Plastics" on the lawn. Ongoing traffic slowed down to view the display.

Students and staff making the pledge to reduce and recycle plastic disposable water bottles were given BPA free aluminum water bottles. It is very important for it to be BPA free since that chemical, commonly used in plastics, is harmful and has been linked to many health problems.

A poster was placed next to the collection box to inform people about how using reusable BPA free water bottles is the better choice. The educational poster also shared facts about reducing, reusing, and recycling.

Students created a Goodbye Plastics Website, and asked their classmates, staff, and teachers to take a pledge to promise to use more reusable water bottles and fewer disposable ones.

The students received a lot of attention for the project, including the article "Student Launches 'Goodbye Plastics' " in the Current In Carmel newspaper.

To round out the project and facilitate reusable water bottle use, a Hydration Station was installed at Clay Middle School near the cafeteria. Students and staff were excited to use it both for its convenience and because they were glad that they could easily help the environment on a daily basis. In the first month of school over 2,000 water bottles were saved with this machine.