My Experience With the Knoxville Phone Book Recycling Poster Contest

by Layla Mosadegh
(Knoxville, Tennessee)

Mount Olive Elementary, a school in South Knoxville, really believes in the practice of recycling.

How do I know? I am a fifth grader there and try to participate in all the activities that involve recycling. One such activity was when my art teacher, Ms. Dome, gave the 5th grade classes an assignment to enter the Phone Book Recycling Poster Contest sponsored by the City of Knoxville and Knox County.

We all worked as hard as ever while talking about the importance of recycling. The competition looked hard to beat. Everyone wanted a chance to get out the message of recycling plus the chance to win the big prize, $50.00. (Hey, we are 10 year olds - what can I say!)

The design I did was a close-up of a recycling bin, a phonebook and a hand drawn on white paper. The reason I chose to do it this way was because I knew not a lot of my classmates would have the idea to fill up the entire paper with design - I thought it was rare design.

But the main idea was still to get the word out about “Recycle Your Phone Books.”

I received the news that I won the contest at an assembly at school. My parents were in attendance so when they called my name up to the front - I thought I had done something bad. It turned out that I had done something good, I had won the contest.

To receive my prize, my teacher and I attended the ribbon cutting ceremony of the new recycling center in downtown Knoxville. There were many people there so I was just a little nervous.

But it turned out good. Ms. Dome and I were both presented “big” checks from Mayor Haslam - my teacher won $125 for having her class participate in the contest, I won $50.00. She gets to use the money in her classroom to buy whatever she wants and needs. We also received hats and were part of the team to cut the ribbon. I was right in the middle with Mayor Haslam, how cool is that! My family took lots of pictures and I think I even ended up on the 6:00 p.m. news that night. It was a big, exciting day for me. My parents had fun with it to.

So why did my teacher have us participate in this contest? She wanted us to know what good it is to recycle and then also get the message out to recycle phone books. To recycle is to save parts of the earth, parts that we, as humans, need to survive. A tree, for instance, provides oxygen to breathe. But with trees being constantly chopped down (to produce something like phone books), we are losing oxygen. Recycling phone books is an option for reuse and in turn, not as many trees will be cut.

Think about recycling your phone books and all the other things that can be recycled like plastic. You might just save a tree or something else we as humans need to survive.