Sleeve 4 Sleeve
SAVING THE WORLD, ONE COFFEE SLEEVE AT A TIME
This week we already focused on making new sleeves and getting ready to present at the forum on Friday. Our data says that most people drink hot drinks on a Daily basis and most people use a paper coffee sleeve when they do. Most people do not save the sleeves after the use them too. Most people that took our survey said that they would maybe use the sleeves. Almost everyone said that they would reuse them at least 1-5 times and more than half said that they would donate clothes to help us make more sleeves. The forum went great, a lot of people seemed really interested in our idea and we gave out a lot of sleeves. People asked really interesting questions and we had a great time answering them. We got a great response from our project and it was a lot of fun in the process.
We had much excitement when we walked to the coffee shop and met the manager wearing ghostbuster earrings. On Tuesday we went to Bardonna Larchmont, dropped off our reusable sleeve 4 sleeve coffee sleeves, and met the manager, Vanessa. She thought Sleeve 4 Sleeve was a great idea. Since then, we have had to refill our laser cut engraved box, that Noah and Luke made. We got amazing results. We have already made 91 sleeves and plan to make more since learned that we should make more sleeves to pass out at the forum. We plan to make 60 more. We have decided that giving our unused clothes home teen shelters was a little bit too ambitious and that we probably wouldn't be able to finish that in the time frame we have. We wanted people who took one of our sleeve 4 sleeves to take our survey. We realized that people aren't going to take time out of their day to take a survey. So we are trying to make the link to our website more visible by putting a sign on the box containing the sleeves. We have also started working on our poster and are waiting for our data to come in.
This week we have been very productive. We've made about 85 sleeves and Lucy and Charlotte talked to Bardonna and they said they could use our sleeves in their shop. We laser cut a box to put our sleeves in when we put them in Bardonna. And we also made a survey and 57 people have taken it so far. When we asked if people most of them said they do use coffee sleeves and that they don't reuse them. Our idea the perfect solution to that problem. We are still cutting out sleeves and stitching them but we are not as focused on that as much as when we first started. Hopefully this weekend we will start making the poster that is due next week and it will be amazing. But all and all our CBL project Sleeve 4 Sleeve is going great and we are having no problems. Since our last blog post, our project has progressed a lot. We now have started creating actual copies of our product Sleeve 4 Sleeve and have tested it a bit. We have also just contacted three local coffee shops; Go Get ‘Em Tiger, Pete’s Coffee, and Bardonna. We asked if they would consider using our reusable coffee sleeves and also gleaned some information on how much paper they waste via coffee sleeves each and every day. We learned that Pete’s Coffee uses (and presumably wastes) 150 coffee sleeves each day. Go Get ‘Em Tiger: over 700. Lastly, Bardonna with 150-200 coffee sleeves. That’s a lot of paper wasted from just three local coffee shops. And Pete’s Coffee is a chain so it gets worse. Think of all the coffee shops in the world and how much paper they are wasting each day through coffee sleeves. We want to eliminate this problem with Sleeve 4 Sleeve. We have also decided that all excess clothing we get from the clothes drive will go to a local homeless shelter. We are considering Upward Bound House, as one of our group members, Luke Zanuck, has interacted with this organization before.
We have started our clothes drive at our school and have already gained some clothing through the clothes drive. In total we plan to create 300 reuseable coffee sleeves to help cut down on paper waste. Thank you for reading our blog post and next time you use a paper coffee sleeve, think about its environmental impact. It was a blustery morning as four heroic students formed together and created a group devoted to making a change in this world. Climate change is a huge problem and something must be done about. We took it upon ourselves to make a difference. One smaller problem contributing to climate change is deforestation, and we as a group decided that that was where we should start. But we quickly realized that deforestation is way too big a problem to tackle as 7th grade students in four weeks. We narrowed it down even more and eventually arrived at a much more specific problem that is paper waste in food products and containers. We went through many ideas that we deemed undoable within the time allotted and finally circled back to one of our original ideas, Sleeve 4 Sleeve
Using paper not only kills trees, but uses water and oil. 324 liters of water is used to make one kilogram of paper. That is a huge amount of water. Also 42% of all global wood harvest is used to make paper. And to print a Sunday Edition of the New York Times, it requires 75,000 trees! We can stop all of this waste. Recycling 1 ton saves around 682.5 gallons of oil, 26,500 liters of water, and 17 trees. Our idea could help save paper by reducing paper packaging. Paper packaging makes up ⅓ or more of our trash. And U.S. Offices use 12.1 trillion sheets of paper a year. We came up with the idea to repurpose old, ripped, stain, ugly, etc. clothing that people don't wear anymore. Sleeve 4 Sleeve is a coffee sleeve made out of the old clothes. We will have clothes drives all over LA and use the clothes to make reusable coffee sleeves. We can put these sleeves into coffee shops so people won’t waste as much paper when using paper coffee sleeves because, be honest, have you ever saved kept a coffee sleeve and reused it? We will give all the sleeves to a coffee shop near Lucy Lipofsky’s house called Go Get Em Tiger. We still need to ask them how many coffee sleeves they use a day. We found that thick materials are perfect for these sleeves. Sock, hoodies, and leggings also work because they also ready have the elastic in them. Sources |
AuthorsWe are a group of 7th grade students at Windward School trying to save the world from climate change and deforestation. |