Martial Artists Kick Cans for Environmental Self Defense Project

My project started out with one simple idea that came from a poster I saw. This poster was hanging up in the Minocqua bowling alley and talked about recycling cans. This really caught my eye and I started to do some research on the idea. One idea turned into many and what I came up with was to collect and recycle aluminum cans, old cell phones, and old ink cartridges.

To encourage students to participate we developed a little competition. I divided the students up into two teams. Each team was decided by the students' ages...that way both teams had an even number of adults, five year olds and so forth. The incentive for bringing in their cell phones, ink cartridges, and cans was a free pizza party for the team who brought in the most stuff. Also, we gave out a $25 gift certificate for the pro shop to the person who brought in the most stuff.

At first people didn't bring in a whole lot of stuff, but with in the second week the phones, cartridges and cans started to roll in! I had everyone give me their items directly. I would count what they had and then put their points up on the Team poster. A cell phone was worth one point, a ink cartridges was worth one point, and 100 cans was worth one point.

At the end of the project I added everything up. I wanted to really make a point of showing the students and the community what a group of people could do in only one month's time when they take action.

Here are the final totals..............

83 Cell phones, 136 Ink Cartridges, and 11,265 aluminum cans!

One cell phone pollutes 132,000 liters of water. When you do the math, 83 Cell phones recycled saved 2,894,269 gallons of water from being polluted!!!! A little bit of action from a group of people goes a long way!

Last weekend we had a recycling party. Students from the Academy came out to help us take the pop tops off the cans. The pop tops went to another project, developed by Alex Olewinski. He is donating pop tops to the Ronald McDonald's Houses that helps terminally ill children. Please check out Alex's post on his project. www.leadershipprojects.

At the recycling party we dumped all 11,265 cans onto the parking lot. We had teams set up and had each person at a station. The cans were piled on one side and a few people where in charge of taking the cans and giving them to their team mates in the middle. These people used pliers and took off the pop tops and then threw them into another pile. This pile was the finished cans...ready for recycling. We got through the cans in about 2 hours and we had about 30 people helping. (kids and adults)


We also called the news and they came out to do a story about the success we had. We will also be putting in a press release in the paper this week.

If you would like to do the same project or would like some information on it, please contact me for more information. www.leadershipprojects.com

There are links below for companies who take cell phones and ink cartridges.

www.phoneraiser.com
www.recycleplace.com

~ Nikki Engels
www.LeadershipProjects.com
www.LeadershipProjects.Blogspot.com


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