Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Data from the project will be used toward a larger, city-wide initiative.
PORTALES — What separates the world we live in now from the gray, dystopian locales of our films and literature?
It could be as little as a few trips to the recycling center each month, according to a Portales High School science class.
Standing by a large receptacle full of plastic and other recyclables she and her peers in her honors science class donated, sophomore Paige Gard, 15, said Thursday afternoon that after watching documentaries about rampant pollution, she imagined the earth one day looking as dismal and abandoned as in the film "Wall-E."
"I didn't want the world to become as gross and full of plastic as it seems like it's gonna get," she said.
So the class, under the guidance of science teacher Rebekah Mitchell, decided in late 2017 that it would collect the plastic from 30 students' homes and dispose of it each week in the receptacle.
The class will weigh the plastic contributed at some point and use the data collected to involve the rest of Portales in a large recycling initiative, according to Mitchell.
"With that data, we're gonna try to go out to the schools in our district and try to get all of our schools involved, and then, from there, we hope to try to get our community involved, and maybe some local business," she said.
Establishing a concrete recycling system may not be much of a challenge with enough people aware of the benefits, according to freshman Jackson Swift, 15.
"I think it can happen, I just think we need to put our minds to it and we need to get the attention of city officials. I think that awareness is a huge part of it," he said. "Most people think that recycling is something that's too much work and too hard to do, but as soon as you get into it and you figure out how easy it is to just sort out plastic from the rest of it, you realize that recycling really isn't something that's too hard to do."
For now, the initiative is impacting only those directly involved, but the effect is no less meaningful.
"Now we are doing the exact same thing that we're doing in class in our house. We have two trash cans, one for plastic and one for regular trash. This is one way we're trying to get (the recycling initiative) spread," said 15-year-old freshman Adrian Ontiveros.