Local Hero of Recycling

Time to toot my own horn. Thanks to a friend nominating me, I am one of the 10 Local Hero of Recycling from Preserve: Gimme 5. I had applied for a grant through Tri-County Hazardous Waste and Recycling for Reusable Party Packs for classrooms in my community to help reduce the amount of waste during class parties. This sparked Tri-County Hazardous Waste and Recycling to do the same for the community by buying and having available reusable plates, cups, silverware for community events. We ordered the supplies through Preserve which makes reusable dinnerware from 100% post consumer plastic. They have started a program to recycle the #5 plastic from items such as yogurt cups and hummus tubs.

Receiving this grant allowed me to purchase enough supplies of 10 classrooms. When I delivered the items, I went into the classes and taught a short lesson on durable vs. disposable goods and facilitated an art project with the classes. Each class made a reusable classroom decoration, a banner that says "celebrate", from recycled materials. I also brought in my serger and made reusable cloth napkins with each of the kids to include in their classroom party pack. After receiving this grant, I was contacted by Preserveware telling me that I was a winner of their Local Hero's of Recycling contest! They sent me a great gift package and I had a great time opening the box and sharing it's contents with my family. Thanks Preserve, Stonyfield, Tom's of Maine, Brita and Seventh Generation.

Now that this dinnerware is available for use, it has been used at the Made for Mosier event as well as the Survivor Lunch at the Columbia Gorge Relay for Life, reducing the amount of waste in our landfill!