We are the Staples High School Zero Waste Committee and we are committed to helping reduce our school community's impact on the environment. This is done through various initiatives such as composting, bottle recycling, school/community clean ups, and up-cycling of clothing, among others. We are a group of dedicated educators and students helping to inform the school population about how to change habits to benefit the environment. 

Co-Chairs:

Kayla Iannetta 

"I have been teaching at Staples High School for four years now as a freshman biology teacher. My passion for the environment and reducing waste started years ago in college. I had a professor that taught courses focused on climate change, ecology, and how humans are impacting our world. He was incredibly inspiring and provoked my dedication to reducing my own carbon footprint by limiting plastic use, recycling, growing my own food, using biodegradable cleaning products, switching to a plant based diet, and so much more.  After years of my own research, I am a firm believer that we need a community doing little things to change their everyday lives to positively impact the environment. Those little things can amount to big change and progress in the world around us. When Jenn contacted me about starting the SHS Zero Waste Committee, I jumped at the chance to help start a program that would educate our student body on how to be better for our environment. I think we can do great things not only in our school community, but in our town and larger communities as well."

Jennifer Cirino: 

"As I've been teaching in the Westport District for the past 14 years as both the Coordinator of Information & Technology Literacy and a Staples Librarian, I've realized how forward thinking our schools and town are. In fact, my father was integral with installing charging stations throughout the town at the school, Town Hall, the library, and the train station. He helped me recognize how vital it is to volunteer towards making our world a better place. When I connected with the lead teachers from the elementary schools during the Spring 2018 Westport Maker Faire, I realized how important it was for us to start a Zero Waste program at the high school to help lead the way for our school community. With that in mind, I enlisted the aide of Kayla as a co-chair and other like-minded teachers to start this program."

Presidents:

Current Initiative

During the 2023-2024 school year, we continued our previous initiatives and expended on them. We also started a bottle-recycling program that connected with EyeRecycle to ensure the bottles used by our school are properly returned and recycled, ensuring their repurposing for another day.

In the 2022-2023 school year, we plan to increase the frequency of our store to occurring three times per year: once in the fall, once in the winter, and once in the spring.

Throughout the 2021-2022 school year, our committee has been hard at work to gradually implement a pop-up thrift store. We initially collected clothing from the student body, then resold them at a low price. The purpose of the thrift store is to counter the environmentally harmful effects of fast fashion: clothing only being used for mere weeks creates enormous waste. We opened the pop-up thrift store to cut down on this waste, as encouraging students to re-use clothing can create a substantial impact on the level of waste produced.