Suffolk News-Herald

On Friday afternoon, the Nansemond-Suffolk Academy (NSA) environmental club plans to educate Suffolk food shoppers about the need for recycling. In honor of Earth Week, students in the NSA Lower School and Kilby Shores Elementary have spent the past week drawing environmental awareness messages on hundreds of shopping bags for shoppers to carry and learn from. Paper bags spouting slogans such as &uot;Save the Earth!&uot; and &uot;Recycle now!&uot; will be on sale at Farm Fresh, Food Lion and Wal-Mart on Friday.

&uot;We want shoppers to see that NSA students are trying to make a difference for the future,&uot; said environmental club founder and president Heather Carroll. &uot;The ‘Paper Bag Project,’ lets the people in the community know that kids really care about the future.&uot; The club is sponsored by NSA faculty members Rick Hardee and Barbara O’Berry.

Throughout the school, the club has put pro-Earth messages all over the walls for the Saint classmates to learn from.

Did you know that Americans dump enough aluminum in one year to build 50,000 mobile homes? How about that recycling a three-foot stack of newspapers saves one tree, and that recycling a ton saves 17 trees?

In the upper school hallway, the club recently put together a bulletin board that helps educate students and faculty even more. Made of recycled paper, the board’s full of facts about the responsibility that Suffolk has to its natural surroundings.

A banana peel takes only three weeks to decompose. Cigarette butts, on the other hand, take 80 years.

Think that’s a long time to pollute the environment? Get a load of this: it takes one billion years for a plastic jug to wear away, and Styrofoam never does.

The board also gives several tips for helping the Earth. Rather than turning a heater on full blast, use shades and curtains to insulate your house. To conserve paper, make double-sided copies and use paper scraps for taking notes.