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I teach at an elementary school in Manhattan and our situation is similar to many of the callers--we have the recycling bins, but we don't recycle. I wanted to connect this to other environmental issues at schools. For example, my school is badly overheated during the winter and everyone keeps their windows open all the time. A huge amount of fuel is wasted as a result. From talking to teachers at other schools, I have the sense that this is a common problem. The issue of recycling is, I think, unfortunately only the tip of the iceberg as far as schools' negative environmental impact.

I am a NYC public school teacher of 5 years.

In the largest school district in the country, it's deplorable that there is no budget devoted to recycling infrastructure.

On today's call-in show, I noticed that the only callers with recycling in their school were teachers and custodians working above and beyond the scope of their already overloaded responsibilities. For example, the teacher who ran a recycling club and the custodian who worked to set up a program in his school, even though he isn't paid to do so.

The custodians in my school are given 3 minutes per classroom to do afternoon rounds cleaning up the school. That is all their budget provides. How can we add recycling into their contractual responsibilities without giving them more funding to pay staff to do it?

There is no recycling truck scheduled to visit my school. In 5 years of asking colleagues "does your school recycle?" not one of the teachers I have met from the 5 boroughs had a Dept. of Sanitation recycling truck scheduled to pick up at their schools. What's the point in sorting if no one is collecting recycleables at the curb?

For a system of this magnitude to be successful, money, people, and time need to come from the DOE to manage the huge responsibility of setting up successful citywide school recycling.

One thing the city has done right: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/at_agencies/at_school_schoolresources.shtml

My school used to recycle a few years ago, but the practice fell off somewhere in the midst of the last administrative reshuffling. My impression is that the custodians are trained and willing to do what they can, and the general attitude and infrastructure will be there if there is a grassroots effort. In the website above I found everything I could need to start a recycling movement at a classroom/student level. They include a set of lesson plans that are aligned with standards in every subject for grades 1-8. The key is to teach the students in a fun and hands on way, and then get them to educate the rest of the school by organizing activities and designing propaganda. Throw in a field trip to the future Fresh Kills Park and it starts to sound like a lot of fun.

Which is to say that - if I can keep a handle on curriculum, discipline problems, mandated assessments, and the latest system-wide reorganization that's coming in September – you’ll be seeing my students in the hall this fall, putting up posters and preaching the word of recycling.

It doesn't help that there are posters on the subway that urge people to use wastebins in the stations, naming half a dozen items...& half of these are required by law to be recycled.

It's just as bad in the private sector. As a freelancer, I work in the offices of various companies in the city, & I almost always find that one way or another, recyclable items (mostly huge amounts of paper) are thrown out instead. If Bloomberg wants GreeNYC to work, recycling havs to be enforced, & funded, everywhere.

I work out at Lucille Roberts, whose garbage consists mainly of plastic water bottles, they do not recycle.

I work in a large office building and we have no recycling bins in our kitchens. In our office we can throw paper into a blue bin, but there is nothing for plastic or cans anywhere. I asked and was told that trash and recylables are separated off-site. I find this a bit hard to believe. Who is responsible for recycling in office buildings? The landlord? The individual company?

I'm part-time faculty at a CUNY campus. We have repeatedly asked the administration to return the recycling program to our campus. They cite lack of resources as their reason for being unable to embrace recycling.

Our campus, and much of CUNY, is starved for money. I imagine the situation is similar at other departments throught the city.

I teach at a public HS in the E. Village. I think the host was a little rough w/the custodian saying he was a lynch pin betw. the trash & Dept. of Sanitation. The custodian was right. If it's going in the wrong designated cans in the classroom (kids, teachers) & the teachers' lounge, the point of failure is with the kids & teachers. The problem can be solved at the indiv. school level: principals & teachers & kids.

We have requested recycling bins for our school several times over the years. Our custodial staff has promised these bins but they have never materialized. Our students have shown they are willing to recycle by offering to put up signs and help police recycling. They also have approached the custodial staff to remind them we would like bins. We have only one black bin per classroom so far. I wonder if this is a budget issue and the funds are being used for other more pressing issues in our very old building.

Even worse than schools not recycling: the Department of Parks and Recreation!

I spent this past summer as an Urban Park Ranger and we didn't recycle at all. There are not recycling bins in the Nature Centers or Parks Enforcement Offices in the parks I was in (Flushing Meadows Corona Park and Forest Park), let alone public pins in the parks themselves.

The Parks Dept offices may recycle, but my experience is that out in the parks this does not happen, and I think it is a shame.

From my experience as a teacher in the public school system, at the end of the day the custodians through both trash and recycling into the same rubbish bin regardless of how fastidiously we teachers sorted it in our classrooms.

From 2004 through 2006 I participated as a vendor in a system wide program that involved reuse, reduction and recycling of excess materials in NYC public schools.

In that time, the program reached about half of the schools and resulted in approximately 2 million pounds of materials that were reused or recycled. Otherwise, they would have likely ended up in the municipal waste stream.

However, there were also recyclable paper materials that we did not handle. They were intended to be disposed of via the normal school recycling process.

When we instructed the schools that those materials should be recycled, we got a very mixed response. More schools than not intimated that they did not have a functioning recycling program.

At the central administrative level, they were happy to go along with the fictional assumption that all schools were recycling.

Within the individual schools, the biggest barrier seemed to be with the custodial staff not embracing the process. This also seemed to trickle over into Staff apathy. If it was all going to end up in one waste stream, why bother.

The real problem here is the lost educational opportunity. Adults should be leading by example and help kids develop good life long habits.

I work as a Teaching Fellow in a Brooklyn elementary school. When I noticed that even though I had seperate trash bins for paper and regular trash in my classroom, they were thrown out together, I approached the principal. She brushed me off quickly. Keep in mind that this was a neighborhood that is never plowed after snow storms-it isn't in anyone's consciousness to recycle, or clean up for that matter. I took all of my recycling home with me and gave up on trying to hold my school accountable.

Schools aren't the only city agency not recycling. Look at police precincts and the Police Academy. You may find paper recycling containers here and there, but their contents are thrown out with the garbage (and often the recycling containers are just used as rubbish bins). There are no bottle recycling containers in precincts or the Police Academy.

I'm not sure about the situation at Police Headquarters, but the amount of paper and containers that is not recycled at the Police Academy is amazing.

I was placed by Teach for America at a public school in the Bronx. I taught second grade for the past two years. Not once did my school separate its trash. We threw out pounds and pounds and pounds of recyclable material, with never even an effort by the school or its custodians to even think about recycling. However, failure to recylce was the least of the problems my school faced: inexperienced administration, un-qualified teachers, lack of community involvement, and a sad cycle of lack of education were more pressing concerns than how to recylce our trash.