County Environmental Expert 'Talks Trash' with Tibbott 5th Graders

For the sake of future generations, today’s young people and their families need to be “smart shoppers” working hard every day to reduce the amount of trash they produce.

That’s what Wyn Hyzer from the Will County Land Use Department told Tibbott Elementary School 5th graders Wednesday.

“The only message we got years ago was do not litter… and that’s OK,” she said. “But today we’ve taken it farther with three words: reduce, re-use, recycle. And reducing your trash is the most important thing of all.”

Hyzer urged students to pay attention to potential trash leftover before buying foods and drinks at the store. She helped students understand that it is better to bring food to school in containers that can be used over and over again.

“Make sure you’re not creating trash,” she said, adding that if students bring their lunch to school, “with a little planning ahead, you should have almost nothing left over at the end of the lunch period.”

The environmental expert told students every American throws away an average of four pounds of trash a day.

“Today garbage goes to the landfill. It used to be called a dump, a steaming pile of all sorts of things,” Hyzer said. “But our government decided we needed to do something with our smelly trash so today’s landfills are dirt and clay and plastic, and every day it’s all covered with a new layer of dirt.

“When you put your garbage out on garbage day, everything goes to the landfill,” she added. “So be sure to put out your recycling in a separate container to a different truck can pull up and take it to a place called a recycling center so it can be made into something brand new.”

Hyzer also suggested students find other ways to use some of their trash, pointing out that teachers are “the best re-users in the world.”

“There is no such thing as ‘away,’ ” she said. “If you throw something away, it doesn’t fall off the Earth. If you get in the habit of re-using things, we’ll save some space in the landfills.”