On December 12, All Island Recycling (AIR) announced the winners of their interschool bottle recycling campaign âOn Your Mark, Get Set, RECYCLE!â, carried out in the Kingstown school district.{{more}}
From November 19 to December 11, 15 primary and secondary schools competed for cash prizes by collecting plastic bottles.
Students were encouraged to deposit their bottles into the trademark blue recycling bins at their schools and the bottles were collected and delivered to the AIR facility in Campden Park.
Over the 15 school day period, the schools collected just over 38,000 empty soft drink bottles.
Every participating school collected a cheque for over $100, ranging from $111 to just over $1,700 for their efforts in collecting the empty plastic bottles.
The winning school was Anglican Primary School, which collected $1,730 worth of bottles and was awarded a first prize of an additional $1,500.
The second place prize of $1,000 was awarded to Windsor Primary School, which collected $1,027 worth of bottles. Third placed school, C.W. Prescod Primary, collected $487 worth of bottles, and got a prize of $500.
Senior Vice President of AIR Dwight Hillocks said, âAt this juncture of the project, the competition and financial incentive are in an effort to create a mindset where the current students grow up with recycling as a natural way of living for them and ideally pass it on to their own kids that are born into an environment that promotes this way of thinking. We want them to know that they have made a difference and can continue to do so beyond our timeâ.
He also expressed pleasure that the project saved over 38,000 empty soft drink plastic bottles from getting into landfills and oceans, within a 15-day period, where they normally end up. âThat was done one bottle at a time. Imagine what we can all do over a year period while helping to preserve the beauty of our country at the same time.â
AIR is based in South Florida and SVG, and will soon be operating in other Caribbean islands.
AIR is also currently looking for agents in all of the school districts in SVG.
To become part of the AIR team, agents have to be committed to a cleaner environment.
AIR will start the next interschool competition when school reopens in January of 2013, and this time it will include the other nine school districts. AIR is looking forward to duplicating what was accomplished with this first successful pilot programme.
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