To the Editor:

I take a Spanish level 4 class as a sophomore at Guilderland High School. In our Spanish class, we were asked to make an environmental change.

We spent about a month discussing the environment (in Spanish, of course) and, during the environment unit, we started a project by doing something called “Trash Math.” Trash Math was a journal where we were required to take note of everything that we threw away over the course of a couple days. And you can take my word that a chart that covered a front and back piece of paper was filled up rather quickly.

After we completed Trash Math, we started to focus on what we wanted our environmental change to be. I decided I wanted to focus on toxic items that are thrown in the trash.

These toxic items include batteries, cleaning wipes, and pens.

For now, we can just focus on batteries. Over the course of a week, about 80 students trashed 10 batteries.

But then I thought: What if we increased this number of students to 2,000 (roughly the number of students in Guilderland High School)? Over a week, 2,000 students were estimated to throw away 286 batteries.

And, on an even bigger scale, I did some number-crunching to figure out how many batteries would be estimated to be thrown out by 2,000 students over the course of a year. Over the course of a year, 2,000 students were estimated to throw out 14,872 batteries.

I don’t know about you, but I think that is a lot of batteries and a lot of toxic items in general that are going in the trash and affecting the environment by polluting the air and contaminating the water and possibly the food we eat.

The reason I am writing this is because the public needs to be aware of this problem. Before you throw out something toxic, do some research on where you can dispose of the toxic item in a more environmentally friendly way.

It is illegal to throw away batteries of any kind (9 volt, car batteries, etc.) There are many times during the year (especially in the spring) where the town holds toxic waste collection days where you can get rid of toxic items for free, and they will do the rest! If everyone does this, we can decrease that number a lot and save the environment.

Zach Connolly, sophomore

Guilderland High School