Individually, those half-pint plastic bottles of milk that students at Clear Lake Elementary drink during their snacks and lunches aren’t very big.
But when added together those tiny bottles are taller than the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower combined.
Since the beginning of the school year, the kindergartners in teacher Diane Lukas-Noe’s class have been collecting the 5-inch tall Country Fresh bottles as part of an exercise that involved counting, adding and environmental awareness.
Last week, parent volunteer Mike Vedrody used mason line and wooden stakes, donated by Home Depot, to create a 1,525-foot maze that represented approximately 3,600 of the 3,957 bottles the class had saved to date.
‘We never expected to get into the thousands,? said Lukas-Noe, who personally recycled them all through her paid residential trash service in Lake Orion.
The whole idea was to teach the kids the value of recycling by showing how much space 3,600 milk bottles would occupy if they had ended up in a landfill, instead of being reused.
‘If you laid your bottles end-to-end, this is what you get,? Vedrody said. ‘Your daily consumption of one milk bottle doesn’t seem a lot to you, but if you add it up every day, you could do a lot with it.?
Vedrody determined the average daily consumption of the class to be 25.5 milk bottles or 10.63 feet.
Once the maze was completed with help from parent volunteers Renee Felix, Maureen Eckola, Jeanne Keefer, Kelly Abraham, Sandy Veach, Donna Kabat and Larry Douglas, the entire Clear Lake student body was invited to run or walk through it.
At different points along the maze, examples of real life objects were used to illustrate the number of feet.
For example, the Empire State Building is 1,250 feet, the Eiffel Tower is 186 feet, Hoover Dam is 726 feet, the Statue of Liberty is 151 feet, a football field is 360 feet, a Blue Whale is 90 feet and a school bus is 40 feet.
Felix, who serves as the parent adviser for the school’s Green Team, hopes to use this exercise as part of the environmental club’s overall effort to somehow bring plastic recycling to Clear Lake next year.
Right now, the school is paid by a company to recycle its paper items.
But in order to recycle plastic products, the school would have to pay a company to haul them away and that’s simply not affordable from a budget standpoint, according to Felix.
‘When I called around to see if we could get (plastic) recycling, they said it’s like hauling air,? she said. ‘For them to bring their trucks out and haul our plastic bottles, it just wasn’t cost-effective for them.?
In the end, Lukas-Noe was very pleased with her class? efforts. ‘I think it’s awesome ? being so young, caring for the environment,? she said. ‘A lot of them tell me they’re recycling now at home. They’re reminding mom and dad to recycle.?