At Earth Camp I experienced the impact of recycling in Tuscon. We went to the recycle center and saw all of the items people sent to the plant to get processed. I felt that the percent of 21, instead of 40, was pretty low, and that everyone should (and I know that "everyone will read this and magically recycle every item they can recycle" is not true) start to monitor their trash and recycle. The impact of all the plastic bottles and cardboard boxes in huge bales of crushed recycled things overwhelmed me, but what scared me was that it wasn't even everybody's recycling. There were rows and rows of just that days' bales along the fence. So I wondered how much people actually threw away, and NOT recycled.

My goal for after Earth Camp is to talk to my principal and the higher administrators about recycling in our school. I want them to see how much of the garbage is plastic and aluminum. I'd like to start a well-supervised recycling project for our school and have people make sure they are in fact recycling their recycle-ables.


We have paper recycling, and NO actual recycling for plastics and aluminum. But we have so many soda machines, and we sell alot of bottles and cans, in fact the only drink that is not in plastic or aluminum are the milk cartons that barely anybody buys.

Recycling bins in our school would make a difference. The recycle-ables take up so much room in the trash cans. I don't even want to think about how much of things in my city's dump is recycleable. I want to find how far the closest plant that will pay for aluminum and plastics to our school, and how we could bring everything to the plant.

So, camp in one word: Amazinglyawesomerific! I made so many new friends, and I cant wait to see everyone again next year!! Emily and I made awesomely random videos under the bunks last night. We even had a broken tennis ball (that Jesus drew a face on it) named Pacman. He was our entertainment, and Emily has a plastic little cow named Cowy. We had so much fun in our little two person tent on Mt. Lemmon and on the beach in Ensenada Grande. At the beach, we didn't even unroll our stuff. We slept on our big pile of random gear.

We went snorkling 4 days. It was oh-so-much fun but there were little bits of jelly fish stingers floating around in the water and my upper lip got stung. So now its swollen, but all-in-all, this was an amazing trip, and I'm so happy that I got to go on this trip. I can't wait to get everyone's e-mail and phone numbers to stay in touch and then we can all get together again and have a sweet party!

Almost everything here was different for me, I am from Wisconsin, so obviously the heat was crazy and this was also my first time out of the USA. There were 4 of us from Wisconsin: Hannah, Me, Max, and Reyna. In Wisconsin, we had our own little get-together in Wisconsin with Marge Brown and our families. Now that I've been in Mexico and Arizona, Wisconsin seems so far away, and I don't think I really want to go back!

In the picture above: Reyna, Me, Mr. McCarthy (My and Reyna's ex-bio teacher who gave us this information), Marge Brown, Max and Hannah.