Our Maine Street's Aroostook Issue 32 : Spring 2017 | Page 22

A Trash To Treasure
Fashion Show
words by Stacy Belanger photos by Michael Gudreau
Did you know that every Sunday, about 500,000 trees are used to
produce the 88% of newspapers that never get recycled? American
people throw away enough garbage daily to fill about 63,000 garbage
trucks. If you lined these trucks end to end for an entire year, they
would stretch halfway to the moon! These statistics are alarming and
if we don’t take immediate action to reduce our carbon footprint, our
children will suffer the affects of it for many generations to come.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama said it best when he said,
“Only when I saw the Earth from space, in all its ineffable beauty and
fragility, did I realize that humankind’s most urgent task is to cherish
and preserve it for future generations.”

As an educator I knew that I had to take immediate action, I
needed to teach my students the importance of going green, and how
to better protect and preserve the natural beauty of the world that
surrounds them. After all, we all need to be more environmentally
conscious, to learn to take better care of our Earth, and to work
together to reduce the amount of waste that is going into our landfills.
This is when the idea for the Trash to Treasure Fashion Show first came
alive.
(Continued on next set of pages > )
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SPRING 2017