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Bring us your (clean) stretchy plastic/plastic film and help Explorers win a bench for our campus! And learn about another way to help our planet in the process.
We officially began our NexTrex Recycling Challenge in March 2025!
Our goal is to collect 1,000 pounds of plastic film to be recycled and repurposed into Trex’s composite decking material. If we log 1,000 pounds collected before March 2, 2026, we will win a bench for our campus!
We are asking families to help us collect this and send it with your child to school. There are two boxes in the front entrance and one box between the music rooms students can drop plastic off at.
We are collecting STRETCHY plastic aka plastic film, or plastic with number 2 or 4 recycling symbols on it. If you’re unsure, you can pull it, and if it stretches, then bring it in! This video does a great job of explaining how to judge if it can be recycled with this program.
In Spring 2025, 4th and 5th grade students signed up to be part of a “Recycling Challenge” Choice Block Class during one of their Encore class times. Every week, they are gathering the donated plastic from the 3 bins around the school, sorting it to ensure only the correct type of plastic is taken to the donation sites, weighing the bags, and submitting the weight to our NexTrex portal. They also have created media to disseminate educating staff, students, and families on what can and cannot be recycled with this program. We hope to continue this Choice Block Class in Fall 2025 so we are able to meet our goal!
We sorted through many bags of donations the first week and found the most common items that we had to throw away were harder produce bags (like the zipper totes apples often come in), ultra shiny and loud crinkly plastic wrap that didn’t stretch, food bags like what granola comes in, and food wrappers that also did not stretch.
If you have any questions on if something is recyclable, check out Trex’s “Educate” page or email Mrs. Hutto ([email protected]).
Lastly, if you would like to sign up to pick up our weekly collections, please use this link. You can drop off at Harris Teeter whenever is convenient for you, just lay the bags next to their collection bins.