Hallie Clark, the new education and outreach specialist for Perry County Waste Reduction and Recycling, has been in the job since June, having replaced Katrina Carpenter, who retired. During a commissioner’s breakfast event last month she described her duties as sharing information on recycling and waste reduction with the community through multiple channels. “My role is education specialist,” she explained. “That just means that I do all of our outreach, so going out to the schools, organizations, if there are events, setting up tables to have informative papers out about recycling, about how to reduce your waste, and what exactly all that means.”

Much of her work is done in local school classrooms. For example, she said, “I’ve gone to Crooksville, to do their fourth grade compost experiment. Those students brought in a couple items of trash and then some food items and we built compost bins for each class.” The students have predicted which items they think will decompose and which won’t, so in the spring “we’re going to go back to see if any of their answers were correct, see what did decompose, what stayed the same, and have a little discussion about what went on there,” Clark recounted.

Clark said she’s also made multiple visits to Holy Trinity School in Somerset. “My first time we talked about plastic pollution and the environment, how we pollute the ocean, and they were really interested in that,” she reported. The students learned how plastic discarded as litter makes its way into the environment including the oceans, “and we talked about the impact that can have on our wildlife whether they’re ingesting it, (or) getting tangled up.”

To read the full story, visit https://www.perrytribune.com/news/article_68079120-c0f2-11ed-ac8d-a38db1bf5e73.html.
Author: Jim Phillips, Perry County Tribune
Image: Perry County Tribune

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