Keep Genesee County Beautiful Partners with Keep America Beautiful for School-Based Recycling Education in Flint Schools
Keep America Beautiful and its local Flint, Michigan, affiliate Keep Genesee County Beautiful recently announced the launch of an integrated recycling education and awareness initiative for the 10,000 school students affected by the Flint water crisis.
The comprehensive recycling education program, funded by The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlè Waters North America, the PepsiCo Foundation and the Walmart Foundation, brings Keep America Beautiful’s pre-kindergarten through college educational resources and supplemental curriculum materials to Flint schools in an effort to increase the capture of water bottles for recycling.
Designed using Keep America Beautiful’s proven behavior-change methodology, the educational activities and resources teach the fundamentals of litter prevention; preserving our resources; responsible solid waste management; and how to reduce, reuse and recycle.
Keep America Beautiful had worked in tandem with KGCB to tailor the recycling educational lesson plans, tools and activities for Flint’s students, while ongoing recycling education and program implementation will be conducted by KGCB staff and area educational partners.
The program offers one educational kit per school, which includes ready-to-use classroom lessons, activities and games for each grade that align with state and national educational standards as well as the Flint Community School’s curriculum. Resources include take-home materials in an effort to bring the school education and experience home, reaching families in their residences to also enhance curbside recycling participation.
The educational program was initiated a year after The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlè Waters North America, PepsiCo and the Walmart Foundation began donating up to 6.5 million bottles of safe and clean drinking water to Flint school students in response to the water crisis in that community. From the outset of the program, they have been providing for the storage and delivery of the bottled water, as well as the transporting of the empty water bottles for recycling.
