NMS Science Team Collects Tapes With Charter Communication Campaign

Newtown Middle School students Dan Spillane, Ryan Sholtes, Christian Soderquist, and Kyle Humber approached CTV-21, Charter Communication’s community access channel, several weeks ago with a recycling idea.

Later calling themselves “Team Green Media,” the group put together and worked with Charter’s community access department to promote environment consciousness by distributing collection boxes in the school to educate the students and staff about the many different approaches to recycling.

By offering to collect unwanted videotapes, cassettes, CDs, and DVDs, the students hoped NMS students would take the message of preserving the environment, and return with some media to recycle.

Charter’s CTV-21 immediately supported the team’s efforts by offering to pay for the removal and recycling cost of the tapes they would collect.  After three successful years of sponsoring a tape recycling campaign and collecting more than 16,000 pieces, Charter CTV-21 partnered with Team Green Media in its campaign.

The group established 12 drop-off sites, and inspected them regularly for recycled media. The team had one month to implement the campaign, as per an eighth grade science project limitation.

During the initial meeting with CTV-21, team members were advised as to what they should expect in response to the campaign, such as seeing media items other than those asked for showing up in the boxes.

At the start of the campaign Team Green Media set a goal to collect 1,000 tapes.

The tapes were initially slow to accumulate, but by the end of the second week, they began to collect. 

Through the efforts of Team Green Media, 1,731 pieces weighing approximately 1,500 pounds were collected Most of these items were tapes, with a few CDs and cassettes.

The materials will be reused to manufacture new products. 

The media collected will be inspected and those pieces considered to have value will be set aside for a volunteer from The Friends of the Cyrenius H. Booth Library to inspect and hold for its annual book sale. More than 100 tapes have already been directed to the library book sale from Team Green Media’s campaign. The rest of the tapes will be loaded onto a pallet and shipped to a preferred recycler, GreenDisk. GreenDisk will first securely destroy of the recorded information on tapes and then break down the tapes to reuse the plastics in the manufacture of new products.

Charter Communications’ will continue to run its annual Media Recycling campaign.

Charter’s campaign was originally established to encourage people to get more involved with their community by taking advantage of their local access channel.

For more information on CommuniTyVision 21 and the “Recycle Your Tapes” campaign call 203-304-4050 or go to www.communityvision21.com.