Jessica McLaughlin, a senior at Cab Calloway School of the Arts in Wilmington, recently won a student Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for her environenmental documentary, "Waste Not Want Not: In a Nation of Want." She shared some behind-the-scenes information with the Community News.
Q) What's the story behind your documentary?
A) The documentary followed a girl going throughout her day, just doing normal things like getting up and going to work. Inside her day, there are little snippets of facts about waste that occurs everyday that we don’t even think about, like photocopies and the amount of paper that is used and wasted. I made it as a project for my cinema class and I wanted to do something that would bring attention to the environmental club at Cab Calloway.
Q) Why are you so interested in recycling?
A) It’s kind of fuzzy how it all started, but I feel strongly that we have to take care of this world because there is really nowhere else we can go. If we screw it up, it will either take the earth millions of years to recover or it won’t recover at all. We need to recycle and reduce our waste to keep the place where we’re living OK, because if we just contaminate it there’s now way that we can possibly bring it back.
Q) Why did you decide to create a recycling organization at Cab Calloway?
A) I had been interested in environmental things for a while, so I naturally looked for an environmental club, but I couldn’t find one. So I looked into starting one up myself. When I was starting up the club for the school, I started up the recycling program, as well.
Q) How does the milk bottle recycling program work?
A) At lunchtime, we all get milk on our lunch trays, and when people are done they put them into blue containers. Last year, we would empty the containers on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and sort through them and dump out the leftover milk, which was kind of gross. Then we would box them up and send them to a place in New Jersey where they process them and turn them into other items that they sell on their website. For every milk bottle, we get 2 cents, and that money allows us to buy more recycling containers and beautify the school by planting trees.
