A couple in Laval, Que. has sparked a fierce debate over how far schools should go to teach children about environmental responsibility after their six-year-old son was shut out of a kindergarten draw to win a stuffed animal because he had an environmentally unfriendly sandwich bag in his lunchbox.
Marc-André Lanciault said he hadn’t heard of the school’s draw or any environmental policy until his wife, Isabel Théorêt, was making their son Félix a sandwich and he begged them not to put it in a plastic bag.
“He said, ‘No mommy, you can’t do that. Not a Ziploc,’ ” Mr. Lanciault said.
Through tears, the boy told his parents that the school had held a draw to win a stuffed teddy bear and only children who didn’t have any plastic sandwich bags could enter. The family normally uses Tupperware, but it was all in the dishwasher, and so they had packed their son’s ham sandwich in a plastic bag.
When Mr. Lanciault questioned his son’s teacher, she confirmed the school had staged the draw at a lunchtime daycare and that any student with a plastic sandwich bag was excluded. “You know Mr. Lanciault, it’s not very good for the environment,” the teacher told him. “We have to take care of the our planet and the bags do not decompose well.”
Mr. Lanciault said he objects to the fact that a school would penalize a kindergartner for his parents’ choice to use non-recyclable lunch containers and that his son hadn’t learned any valuable environmental lessons, except to fear plastic bags.
“If we want to teach people about the environment, I can understand that,” he said. “But surely there’s a better way than to penalize kids. The goal wasn’t achieved anyway. At the end of the day my son doesn’t know why he shouldn’t use a Ziploc bag. It’s not only the bag, it’s the whole idea that we’re being brainwashed from everywhere. They told us Ziploc bags are bad, so we’ve stopped thinking about it and just started applying the rule.”
The Laval school board didn’t respond to repeated interview requests from the National Post.
I live next to Quebec and think the teachers are all cut from the same lefty cookie cutter.
ReplyDeleteOne of my kids teachers told the kids to wash the plastic sandwich bags so they could be re-used.
I don't know what planet some of these um, teachers come from, perhaps they use their dirty socks as wash cloths.
Anyway, yeah the kids use tupperware now for their lunches, due to lectures from them regarding how we were destroying the environment with plastic sandwich bags.
Perhaps this reduces enough carbon footprints to justify why the same teachers drive SUVs lol.
http://www.xomba.com/technique_devised_recycle_100_household_plastic
ReplyDeletehttp://www.xomba.com/machine_recycles_waste_plastics_back_oil
These folks need to read up on the promise of scientific research which has pretty much made disposal of plastics a done deal. All that's left to achieve now is the cleanup! (Like those big swirling masses of plastics floating around in our oceans. With machines like the latter of the two examples listed above, ships could seine the stuff and turn it on-board into fuel.)
Ah, heck...I just decided to do an article on the topic:
ReplyDeletehttp://sloughdude.multiply.com/journal/item/103/Trash_to_Treasure_Trash_to_Oil