Notes

Outline

The Earth Day Groceries Project http://www.earthdaybags.org/

Introduction The Earth Day Groceries Project is a cost-free environmental awareness project where students decorate paper grocery bags with environmental messages for Earth Day. Earth Day is on April 22nd every year.

History The Earth Day Groceries Project is one of the oldest and largest educational projects on the Internet. It began in 1994 with an invitation sent to two educational discussion lists.  Forty-three schools sent in reports saying they had successfully participated!

Today: Thousands of schools (and other groups) take part every year.  Their inspirational reports, and pictures from hundreds of schools, are all on the web site.

Four Simple Steps – 1 1.  Borrow. Contact a local grocery store that uses large paper grocery bags. See if the manager will let you "borrow" enough bags so that each student in your school can decorate one. Grocers usually get these bags in "bundles" of 500.

Four Simple Steps – 2 2.  Decorate. Have students at school decorate the bags with pictures of the earth, environmental messages, the name of your school, etc. Be creative! DO NOT allow students to write their last names on any bags.

Four Simple Steps – 3 3.  Deliver. A couple of days before Earth Day you and/or your students return the decorated bags to the grocery store - with many thanks to the manager! The store then distributes these bags (full of groceries) to happy and amazed shoppers on Earth Day.

Four Simple Steps – 4 4.  Report. Fill out the Report Form on the project web site with a count of how many bags your school made. All reports are posted on the project web site: www.earthdaybags.org

Registration? You do not need to register.

Where to start? www.earthdaybags.org

Happy Earth Day! (April 22) Questions? The web site has answers to most. Email contact: Mark Ahlness, project coordinator <mahlness@halcyon.com>