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Valley Central needs your help

Starting on April 2nd, our school, Valley Central Public School, will be collecting plastic shopping bags for the Plastic Bag Challenge to raise awareness about the harm plastics do to our environment.
Valley Central
Grade 7 students and student teacher, from Valley Central Public School, pose with the first plastic bags they’ve collected for the Plastic Bag Challenge. (Valley Central Public School)

THUNDER BAY -- Starting on April 2nd, our school, Valley Central Public School, will be collecting plastic shopping bags for the Plastic Bag Challenge to raise awareness about the harm plastics do to our environment.

In case you don’t know, the plastic bag challenge is where schools or classes collect plastic bags to recycle at Walmart, a sponsor of the challenge. A company called Trex is partnering with Walmart to collect the bags and recycle them into alternative decking products.  By collecting as many bags as we can, we are helping marine animals across the globe. Water pollution is a significant problem throughout Canada and the world.

Plastic bags don’t just affect marine animals. Deer are one of the many animals that are eating plastic bags which break down into tiny micro plastic in their stomachs. For people who eat deer, for example, the toxins are still in their stomachs, and when they eat deer, they too consume the plastics. Everyone is affected by the harmful effects of plastic bag pollution.

In Canada alone, we use up to around three billion plastic bags each year according to Globe and Mail. Most plastic bags are used for around twenty minutes or less but takes hundreds of years to break down or decompose. We only end up recycling less than 11 per cent of all plastics in Canada. This leaves the other 89 per cent to slowly destroy our ecosystems, environment, and animals every day. The toxic chemicals in plastic bags, when littered, will slowly be released into our soil, causing animals to potentially choke on the plastic residue.    

Our school has a goal of collecting a total amount of 25,000 bags by the 2nd of May. We will have drop off boxes for the bags in different locations. The locations include: Valley Central School, Fresco’s Deli, The Barber Shop, AJ’s Trading Post, Lu Lu’s Variety, The Cheese Farm, Westgate High School, Co-op on Boundary, Home Hardware in Rosslyn, Santorelli’s Truck Stop, South-Neebing Variety, Westfort Foods, Rosslyn Library, and the Murillo Library.

We need your help to raise awareness about the dangers of plastic bags in our environment, the harmful effects on our animals, and how they are slowly killing our planet. We recognize that we won’t be able to stop the production of plastic bags, but we can make a difference by recycling, reducing our use of plastic bags, and reusing the bags more than once. We hope you can assist us in making a difference by participating in our challenge. Remember to take care of our earth because there is no planet B.

Peyton Somerfield, Alexa Dysievick, Alyssa Smith, and Kolby Reed

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