Thomas Gagnon, the head PIHS custodian, cleans up the library from a water leak. He wipes down the tables and checks to see if the books are okay. “It has been a busy day,” Gagnon says. He grabs the recycling, empties the bins, and takes his cart while he heads down a hall full of classrooms where students are learning math applications.

Custodians fulfill a crucial job for keeping any school or business clean. Here at PIHS they also hold the answer to the common misconception that we don’t recycle, either bottles or our office paper.

When it comes to our redeemable bottles, according to Gagnon, the custodians take care of them after their shifts. They get to keep the money from the bottles because they do it on their own time. Before the custodians took care of it, the students were the ones who picked the bottles up. The custodians clean the bottles individually before they bring the bottles to the redemption center.

When it comes to office paper, the high school has two dumpsters: one for both the cardboard and paper and the other for trash. “I think a lot of students get confused because of the recycling dumpster being next to the trash and they think we are throwing it [the paper] away,” Custodian Kevin Wilcox said. “Students just assume they know what they are seeing.” Star City Sanitation comes by every day to empty the regular trash dumpsters, but only once a week on Thursdays to empty the recycling dumpster.

Most students and teachers believe that the office paper is thrown away. “It just takes too much time to recycle, so the chances of it happening are so slim,” junior Alex Walsh said.

An anonymous teacher said that one time she saw a custodian throw the paper away. She asked the custodian why they did that they said his response was because it was too expensive. “It’s so sad, we teach our students to recycle but we don’t do that ourselves,” the teacher said.

Wilcox, the most veteran PIHS custodian was shocked when he heard about that incident and questioned it. It’s unheard of by him to see any of the clean paper and cardboard get thrown away with the regular trash.

If there is a coffee stain or food stain the custodians can’t recycle it. Star City Sanitation just won’t take it. Nor would they take it if the paper is glossy. On the topic of items being too expensive, Wilcox said, “I’ve never been told anything like that. Those decisions are not in my purview.”

Even though there is less of a student population and we definitely don’t use as much paper, we still photocopy to a significant extent. So far this year administrative assistant Judy Cleaves has bought 123 reams of colored paper. Levesque’s Office Supply was contacted but they could not share how much copier paper the high school uses.

Lisa Lovely, a PIHS night custodian, says that the only thing we don’t recycle are the cans in the kitchen. She recycles what’s in the recycling bins at school. Lisa also does her best to pick the recycling out of the trash.

“I notice a lot of the students are the ones that throw away the recyclable items,” Lovely said. “When I see the paper in the trash bin I just put it in the right bin. It’s not that hard.” Her proposal to keep paper goods out of the landfills is to stop using paper plates in classes during food related activities because they can’t recycle dirty paper.

Even though this may come as a shock to some students who were under the impression that our paper was not recycled, sometimes all we have to do is ask and we will get an answer.