Putting a spin on recycling

Thanks to you, my readers, I’m recycling my April 23 column. It’s the one in which I wrote about the many ways Lorraine Fussell’s ESOL Class at Parkview came up with for recycling Gwinnett Daily Post’s green plastic bags and asked you for more suggestions.
   Online-reader responses ran full cycle.
   Carol Daniel of Piccadilly Puppets wrote, “The first thing that comes to mind is a dragon puppet, or some sort of green monster.”
   Richard Anderson of Roswell suggested, “Run the green bags through your shedder to make grass for Easter baskets, hair for St. Pat's day, fright wigs, or green tinsel.”
   Phyl Johnson, a freelance writer in Chesapeake, Virginia wrote, “Wow, I'll never look at another plastic bag in the same way again!” whereas Dennis H. Bender, Sr. Vice President of Communications, Habitat for Humanity International has long looked at recycled plastic bags with a different spin:
   “I was struck by the irony in the secondary uses for “a bright green bag” suggested by your ESOL students. For the families served by Habitat for Humanity, recycling is far from a class assignment or an exercise in creativity. The world’s impoverished recycle to survive. I’ve seen families in The Philippines and in the townships of South Africa make crude dwellings out of rusty Pepsi Cola signs and dismantled car doors. Poor families live within the garbage dumps of Cairo so they can be closer to the refuse they scavenge.”
   Locally, Laura Klingensmith, a secretary at Oakland Center and Odyssey of the Mind Coach at Central Gwinnett High School invited me to meet with her OM team for an exercise in creativity as they prepare for the World Competition at Iowa State University this weekend.
   Odyssey of the Mind, a program based on the premise that creativity can be taught, helps students learn divergent thinking and problem-solving skills. A team of seven students competes in a two-minute brainstorming session and an original theme-based skit in which they must meet requirements such as time, cost, and logistics.
   Taylor Klingensmith, 17, Kristen Snyder, 16, Josh Patton, 18, Kyle Bly, 18, Jeff Morris, 16, Marti Mullen, 17 and Emily Norris, 17 welcomed me with open minds and in two minutes filled my notepad with 69 more uses for those bags.
   But then, recycling ideas come easy to this team. Their project theme, Put a Spin on It, requires that they create and act out a myth about the origin of a great human achievement. They chose Stonehenge, which they constructed with crushed cardboard boxes covered with drier lint to resemble lichen.
   Their myth goes that angels carved a statue as a gift for God. They gave the scraps to Baby Jesus to play with and He recycled them into Stonehenge.
   My spin on Central Gwinnett’s OM team is that they have the world championship—and a future far from an exercise in creativity—in the bag.
052803