Noonan Academy Celebrates Earth Day

On April 22nd students and teachers at Noonan Elementary Academy in Mokena honored both Earth Day and Arbor Day with a tree sapling drive as part of the “Trees Into Cartons, Cartons Into Trees” educational program that highlights the biodegradability of paper-based packaging.
Girl Scouts at the school prepped paper cartons that students brought in for the drive to be used as planters. Students were educated on the benefits of recycling as well as why trees are so important to the environment. Each student went home with a pine sapling in a paper carton with soil and instructions on how to plant the tree, and carton (which biodegrades over time), in their yard.

Noonan parent and software engineer with W.H. Leary, Co., part of the paperboard and packaging industry, Dan McCarty brought the “Trees Into Carton, Cartons Into Trees” program to Noonan on behalf of the Paperboard Packaging Council to showcase how paper and paperboard packaging is both environmentally friendly and sustainable through recycling.

“It’s important to help children start thinking about these topics from an early age,” McCarty says. “Whether we realize it or not, we’re all in this together, and the better we work together at sharing and using resources responsibly, the better we’ll leave things for the next generation.”

The students got to pick from one of four tree types: ponderosa pine, Colorado spruce, Norway spruce or longleaf pine.

“As I mentioned to the students at Noonan, the very first thing God told Adam and Eve to do was to be “fruitful, multiply, and govern the earth.” Governing by definition is managing limited resources, so the more we can do to keep our life sustainable by recycling the better off our future generations will be.”