We are an art friendly home. Most off-school time you can catch one or both of my daughters with markers, crayons or paints in their hands or on a variety of other body parts. Yesterday, I was staring down at one of the buckets of markers that float from room to room thinking I really need to weed out the dry markers at some point soon and I started to wonder what could be done with the plastic casings for markers….necklaces? paving tiles? Of course this lead to the eventual Google search which yielded a much better answer. Crayola has teamed up with the New York based JBI clean energy company to create the Colorcycle Initiative.
Crayola produces 700 million (!) markers a year, only about 17,000 of which are actually recycled. Amazingly, Crayola and JBI have found a way to recycle these markers to create clean fuel and they are paying for schools to ship their used markers to their facility in NY. It’s an awesome demonstration of eco-consciousness meets capitalism and a great lesson to pass on to classrooms of future leaders.
Sign up your school here. Go Crayola!
Is your school participating? Let us know. We’ll add you to our list of participating schools (coming soon).