Recycle Bowl Competition open to local schools

Keep America Beautiful (KAB), the nation’s leading nonprofit that brings people together to build and sustain vibrant communities, is again teaming up with Nestlé® Pure Life®, a brand of  Nestlé Waters North America, to announce the launch of the third Recycle-Bowl youth recycling competition. 

Last year more than 1,500 elementary, middle- and high-schools around the country, representing more than 900,000 students, participated in this fun and exciting race to collect the most recyclable material, and learn about waste reduction and environmental responsibility through in-school recycling. Schools that participate in the Recycle-Bowl competition recycle 10 percent more than schools that don’t participate.

Registration for this incentive-based recycling competition is now open to all public and private U.S. schools at the Recycle-Bowl website at recycle-bowl.org. The competition runs from Oct. 21 through Nov. 15, 2013, culminating on America Recycles Day. Participating schools will track and report how much recyclable material they collect for a chance to win prizes. At the close of the four-week competition, the school in each state (and the District of Columbia) that collects the most recyclable material per capita will win $1,000. A national champion will then be chosen from among the statewide winners to receive an additional grand prize.

“Inspiring young people to recycle at school reinforces the importance of recycling everywhere, whether at home or on-the-go,” said Kelley Dennings, senior director of recycling, KAB. “And while students are becoming better recyclers, their school facilities are also increasing their capacity to handle and recover more recyclable materials, thus creating better and more efficient systems for reducing the school’s waste.”

New to the competition this year are  food scrap and waste reduction benchmarking divisions. Those schools that collect food scraps for composting can see how they rank against other schools. And if the school can provide not only their recycling data but their trash data also, Keep America Beautiful can calculate a waste reduction winner. Educational recycling activities will also be provided online and through a registration toolkit.

Recycle-Bowl is sponsored by Nestlé Pure Life. “The Nestlé Pure Life brand and Nestlé Waters North America are eager to see more recycling take place in our nation’s schools,” said Heidi Paul, vice president of corporate affairs for Nestle Waters North America. “We’re proud to partner with Keep America Beautiful on this important recycling initiative.”