Meet a very special group of sixth graders from Tewksbury who call themselves the green team: Molly O’Neill, Angie Carew, Anna Cafarelli and Lizzy Taggert. They give new meaning to the phrase reduce, reuse, and recycle.
The Green Team is all about recycling.
“We just help the planet, so we’re green and were a team!” said Taggert.
The girls spend two afternoons a week collecting bins of paper from classrooms and bringing them to a recycling dumpster.
“We take bins and you go throughout the school and keep emptying them…when they get full we go to the big bin and we empty it there, and we keep doing that until all the classrooms are done,” said O’Neill.
What’s more, they do it across town at a school for kindergarten to second graders.
The oldest kids are second graders, so the bins are too big for them to hold it the youngest are kindergartners so they obviously can’t do it,” said Carew.
For these girls, it doesn’t seem like work at all.
“I really like the kids there, they are always making me laugh a lot,” said Cafarelli.
“It’s really fun, you get to see your friends and its helpful for the environment,” said O’Neill.
Over the last few years, their recycling efforts have raised hundreds of dollars that money going to fund arts and enrichment programs.
“It makes you feel good about yourself,” said Carew.
“It’s good ‘cause it can help out planet and instead of cutting down trees, we can just reuse it,” said Taggert.
That’s their message to other kids their age.
“It would be a really good thing for them to start recycling its really good for the earth,” said Cafarelli.
Angie, Anna, Molly and Lizzy recently met with the principal of their school, and plan to start the same recycling program there.