When Maisie Weyhing and fellow Pioneer High students saw the school’s recycling being trashed, they took on the job themselves. Izzy Sutton has worked for years to rid the schools of plastic water bottles. | Photo by Mark Bialek

Just before kick-off at the AFC Ann Arbor women’s May 19 soccer match against Kalamazoo FC at Pioneer High School’s Hollway Field, fifteen-year-old Izzy Sutton and two U-M students received formal recognition as female leaders and role models. Sutton, tall and athletic, was a 2023 Washtenaw County Young Citizen of the Year, and has won state and national service awards for her work, which has included raising money for bird and turtle rescue by selling her own line of notecards. Sutton has long called for eliminating single-use plastic water bottles at the Ann Arbor Public Schools, petitioning the school board and administration since fifth grade. Most end up in landfills and as trash in the environment.

She hasn’t persuaded the schools, but at the match, AFC Ann Arbor co-owner Mike Lorenc announced that the preprofessional club would no longer sell water in plastic bottles. It’s switched to aluminum cans, because the more valuable metal is much more likely to be recycled. “I was aware of Izzy’s activism and her desire to move Ann Arbor Public Schools away from plastic,” says Lorenc. “Her drive towards the change had a very big impact on our decision.”

“That made me really happy to hear,” says Sutton. “I’ve been working with the AAPS for so long to try and get plastic eliminated from the schools. So seeing AFC setting an example, that will hopefully inspire the schools.”

”We encourage the use of multi-use water bottles throughout our schools through our hydration stations,” responds AAPS director of communications Andrew Cluley, in an email. But single-use bottles remain available.

Maisie Weyhing, a year ahead of Sutton at Pioneer, is another longtime student climate activist. In her first high school year, she was part of a joint Ann Arbor–Philippines YMCA youth pollution cleanup project that was featured in a video shown at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. But, like Sutton, Weyhing is frustrated with progress at the schools. The school board in December 2022 adopted an Environmental Sustainability Framework for addressing climate change at the schools. But “there is a big drop-off between what the policies are calling for and what actually ends up being implemented at the different high schools and at the different schools,” Weyhing says. “The policies, obviously they’re set by administration, but the implementation falls on the different [school] staffs.” Because of lack of funding or dedicated personnel, even simple measures aren’t being taken.

At Pioneer, “most recycling does not actually happen,” Weyhing says. School custodians usually don’t put recycling contents into the recycling dumpster, because items first must be emptied from plastic bin liners, and contaminants removed. “Most of the time the recycling is contaminated, so what ends up happening is they just end up throwing it in the trash,” Weyhing says. “They’re not getting paid for extra time for sorting through the recycling to make sure it’s not contaminated and ready to go.”

This past school year Weyhing and fellow students in the Pioneer Sustainability Coalition piloted a project to start fixing this. Each week, club members emptied the recycling bin bags from science classrooms, removed unrecyclable contaminants, and then poured the rest into a large cart, which they wheeled outside and emptied into the recycling dumpster.

“If we weren’t doing it, the recycling probably wouldn’t make it,” says Weyhing. “In the future we hope there will be some sort of staff or like someone gets paid to do this. Obviously we will try our best, but this is not, like, a permanent solution.” (Cluley writes that the city’s decision to stop accepting bagged recycling, without offering a cost-effective alternative, “has caused challenges for recycling efforts.”)

In the sustainability framework, the AAPS made commitments to “reduce the use of disposable plastics, recycle at school, and compost whenever possible.” Last school year, however, Sutton, saw no reduction in the amount of plastic. In the cafeteria, “I’ve seen yogurt in plastic cups, fruit in plastic, just stuff wrapped in plastic wrapping. And unfortunately I’m still seeing a lot of plastic bottles at social events.”

Cluley writes that the schools’ food service contractor, Chartwells, “has reduced the use of plastics in many instances and transitioned to using paper boats, plates, cups and bowls wherever possible.” But state and federal food safety rules require plastic products in many cases. “This is a larger supplier issue than what AAPS alone can control,” he writes.

Other problems are clearly local. Last year Sutton and other members of the Freeman Environmental Youth Council, a district-wide group of high school student leaders, conducted a two-day waste audit at the Huron, Skyline, and Pioneer cafeterias. They found that 61 to 93 percent of the trash, by weight, consisted of materials that could have been composted or recycled.

In one positive step called for in the sustainability framework, the schools recently replaced Styrofoam lunch trays with trays made from molded fiber, at twice the price. But even though they’re certified compostable by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), Ann Arbor’s municipal composting facility doesn’t accept them. WeCare Denali, which runs it, only accepts items certified by the Compostable Manufacturing Alliance–Windrow Technology (CMA-W). The company with the city’s commercial composting subcontract, My Green Michigan, generally accepts BPI-certified items, emails account manager Jennifer McCullen, but under its Ann Arbor contract it has to follow WeCare Denali’s standards.

So the trays still get landfilled, not composted. A visual inspection of garbage dumpsters at Thurston and Logan elementary schools in late May found large numbers of them in the trash. Six city compost bins at Thurston sat, apparently unused; one, lid open, was filled with stagnant rainwater. Two compost bins at Clague Middle School sat forlornly, accumulating random garbage.

Last year, thanks to volunteer parents and students, there were pilot cafeteria composting projects at Eberwhite and Dicken elementary schools and Ann Arbor Open (the Open effort has since ended). “Due to our current budget situation there are no plans to move forward with food composting beyond volunteer efforts at individual schools,” Cluley writes.

Related: Waste Not

Dicken parent Abby Rosenbaum started the composting program there last year. “Before I got involved there was no effort being made to divert any waste from landfills,” she says. “I started volunteering at lunch and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was really an astounding level of waste.” Now, a rotating “green team” of third- and fourth-graders spend their recess staffing recycling and composting buckets to make sure younger kids properly dispose of leftover food and other items. “If one volunteer mom can change the whole culture around food waste at lunch, then I think with a little bit of effort and funding, the district could meet the same moment across the entire district,” Rosenbaum says.

Rosenbaum hopes the district will keep waste reduction in mind by installing institutional dishwashers when it tears down and replaces several elementary schools. “I would love to see a new reality where we’re using reusable trays and cups and not generating all this garbage,” she says. “There’s a real opportunity for that, seeing that all these schools are being rebuilt.” Cluley writes that there will be space set aside for dishwashers in the new schools, but for now “the upfront costs and increased operating costs to move to a washing system … are not sustainable.”

Izzy Sutton is aware of the many recycling and composting obstacles, but she and Weyhing are not giving up. They’re inspired by Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist who, at age fifteen, began skipping school to protest global warming in front of the parliament building. “She has courage, and she has the bravery to just tell adults what needs to be said,” says Weyhing.

Weyhing, too, has a message for adults: “Just because youth advocates are working hard, adults can’t just check out on us,” she says. “We still need their support, we need them working, too. They’re still the ones who have almost entirely all the power.”

This article has been edited since it was published in the September 2024 Ann Arbor Observer. The photo caption has been corrected.