Students in a B.C. Interior school have helped protect animals by stopping 523 kilograms of batteries ending up in a landfill.
WL McLeod Elementary School in Vanderhoof won the Battery Blitz School Mission, sponsored by Earth Rangers and Call2Recycle BC, collecting the most batteries of any school in the province.
The total amount collected weighed in at 523.96 kilograms, which teacher Nick Meads said was made possible because of outside buy-in.
“We had amazing community support,” said Meads, who teaches a Grade 4, 5, 6 class with 29 students.
It was the first time the school participated in the challenge and his class took the lead.
“We found out about it through the Earth Rangers program,” Meads told the Express. “They came into our school to teach the students about animals.”
His principal, Libby Hart, gathered more information and in late September early October, the school students and staff embarked on the challenge.
Through various means of communication, families of the school and people in the wider community were invited to participate.
When the batteries came to the school, Meads and his students covered the battery terminals with duct tape, bagged them and placed them in pre-paid pickup boxes provided to them by the contest organizers.
The campaign ran slightly over a month and the school ended up getting a one-week extension just because they had so many batteries. At the beginning the students were excited, Meads said.
“There was a lot of novelty with duct taping batteries and watching science videos, and the fun of doing that,” he recalled. “Towards the end it definitely started to feel a lot more like work for them. After time the novelty wore off but they were more than willing and very hard working at putting all this together.”
The first place prize is $3,000 for the school, plus his class won a pizza party, yet to be celebrated.
How the prize money will be spent is not decided either.
“Our principal and myself have had a couple of conversations and we want to include the students in the conversations because they did the work and we want them to get the say and have something that is going to honour them and work towards them,” Meads said.
When they started collecting batteries Meads taught a bit about recycling in general to the class.
“We talked about where our waste goes and about our local recycling, but we weren’t learning a ton of that in science. We were actually looking at the human body at the time.”
At the onset, Meads was not sure they would amass as many batteries as they did, but once he saw the amount start to increase he felt more confident.
“I did a little bit of research on past winners and realized we really did have a shot at this. Around the halfway point we asked for community support and it really, really expanded.”
Originally from Moose Horn, Man., two-and-a-half hours north of Winnipeg, this is his seventh year teaching in Vanderhoof.
Without hesitation, he responded ‘absolutely,’ when asked if the school will participate in the challenge again.
Giving a shout out to support from Mount Milligan Mine, Plateau Sawmills, Avison Management Services, TELUS, community and family members, he said they could not “have done this without the community’s support that we had.”
Jordan Covens, director of marketing at Call2Recycle, responding for both Call2Recycle and Earth Rangers, said they were very pleased with the effort that the students of British Columbia displayed in the fall 2024 contest.
“Protecting Canada’s environment takes a team effort. It is a pleasure to see communities like Vanderhoof come together to help protect the environment and we congratulate W.L. McLeod Elementary School on this well-deserved victory.”
Since 2016, Call2Recycle and Earth Rangers have partnered in several provinces to educate young Canadians about the importance of battery recycling.
The Battery Blitz contest currently runs in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Prince Edward Island.
In 2024, the Battery Blitz contest partnered with 212 schools across Canada (including 16 in British Columbia) and collected over 41,000 kg of used batteries.
