What can we do to encourage high school students to recycle pop cans?

Question

We have many pop can bins around the school for students to put them in but they won't simply because they're lazy. All the money goes to charity so we'd like to recycle as much as possible. Anyone got any ideas for exciting students to recycle? (Game pitting classes against each other, etc.)

Answer 1

You could seperate the recycle bins into four different bins, one for the senior class, the juniors, the sophomores, and the freshman. Each month or so you can see who has collected the most cans, and award them with some kind of prize. Whether it be a pizza party, candy, extra time at lunch, something that will make them want to get involved. Or you could do an individual thing and have students recycle their cans or bottles for raffle tickets. Have a raffle twice a month or whatever the school chooses. Draw 10-15 tickets (more or less depending on how many students there are) and if your tickets drawn you get a prize. Maybe candy, or a movie gift certificate, or fast food gift certificates. Or even better, if teacher's want to get involved, maybe they would be willing to give out homework passes for the raffle...that would make a high schooler want to get involved.   ;-) Best of Luck!

Answer 2

Allow the students to choose something for the school, or a treat for the students - like a DJ.  It's nice to encourage a charitable spirit, but when my husband turns in our recycling, we keep the money.

A school is a charitable organization, too, and so is an entrepreneurial spirit.  Tap into both.

Answer 3

well at our school we recyceled alot! this sounds stupid but at lunch we only had one trash can and the others were recycling bins. kids would always toss there milk cartons in the bins.

we never had those bins before so i guess everyone tahught it was cool! :D

we also had a recycling club at our school! it helped ALOT!!!

Answer 4

you say pop haha :) where are you from?

but anyways, our principal was getting on us about that

he went on the announcements and started to threaten to take some of our privileges away, like eating outside and such