For my service learning project, I chose to do a recycling project with my class. We collected plastic bottles from the school yard, and various communities. The children had so much fun running around the school yard racing to see who gets the most bottles. It is easy to overlook the great multitude of plastic bottles lying around us every day, but when we gather them we take a step back and think, “How could I have been so oblivious to the fact that all those plastic bottles were lying around right before my eyes?” It made me realize how badly we are damaging our environment.
According to Catherine Clarke Fox, if we fill a plastic bottle quarter of the way up, that is the approximate amount of oil it takes to make one plastic bottle. That’s just crazy! If we keep this up we will definitely run out of oil. Just think about it. If we recycle our bottles, we can reduce the amount of oil that we use to make them. We will then have so much more oil to use for other purposes such as fuel, synthetic fibers, polishes, milk cartons, candles, etc. Fuel prices rise and fall and one of the main reasons is the demand. If something is on high demanded the producer can raise the prices because either way, consumer will still purchase the goods. A great amount of oil is demanded to make plastic bottles. If we recycle them then the demand won’t be as high and the price of fuel would fall. All of us would enjoy that wouldn’t we?
The children understood the importance of saving our precious environment so they even had their parents involved in the bottle collection. It was like a ripple effect. On a few occasions I observed parents coming into the school yard with a sack or large plastic filled with plastic bottles. We collected 3 sacks of plastic bottles. As a treat, the children were treated to

ice cream, which they most definitely enjoyed. This was definitely a learning experience for me. It is something that I plan to continue with for the entire year. Although it was fun, we never forgot about the reason why we are recycling those bottles