I’m astounded by the giant step backward we have taken by eliminating our capacity for recycling in Hawaii. This is especially disheartening in the context of the positive steps we’ve taken in raising awareness of the damage we are doing to our planet through the efforts of young activists like Greta Thunberg.
I’m head of Waimea Country School, and we’ve spent years working with our keiki to reduce, reuse, and recycle. We teach our children about the impact we are making on our environment and how to alleviate it through conservation of resources, composting, and pre-cycling. And we teach them that when we do recycle, we are making a real difference by keeping those materials out of the landfill.
What do I tell my students now?
How do I foster leadership in caretaking our Earth when we have to tell our children that what they’ve been working toward makes no difference and has no impact? How do I square the inspired activism we are seeing in today’s youth with the reality our children face when they are forced to throw biodegradable paper in the landfill?
We compost paper with our green waste in our school garden as much as we can, but this is a teaching garden and does not have the capacity to compost all the paper we use in our learning program.
The county must step up. At a minimum, we need to compost our green waste, food waste, and paper on this island. We can do it! We just need the political will to get the systems in place to make this the standard. Our children are ready. They know that taking care of the planet is the right thing to do. Let’s help them to help all of us.
Amy Salling is the head of school for Waimea Country School.