WALES – Takeisha Pagon, an eighth-grader at Wales Central School, may not know Maine produces 2 million tons of municipal trash per year, a huge increase from 1990.

Or that Maine’s recycling rate is a less-than-stellar 36 percent.

But Takeisha did notice mounds of paper thrown out at her school. It bothered her. She made a proposal to her Student Action Team: Let’s recycle.

With help from school social worker Carrie Colan this fall, the eight students started a schoolwide recycling program.

Each class has a blue recycling bin. Every Thursday, volunteer students go room to room collecting and dumping paper into 5-foot bags. Each week enough paper is stuffed in bags to fill a small SUV.

Volunteer parents or teachers drive the bags to the Monmouth transfer station; from there, they are taken to South Portland to be recycled.

Some schools, including all public schools in Lewiston and two in Auburn, do recycle. But a majority of Maine schools do not, according to experts.

“Schools are watching their budgets carefully” and sometimes see recycling as an added expense, said Bruce White of the Maine State Planning Office.

“Most schools feel recycling is a cost,” said Missi Labbe of ecomaine, a South Portland nonprofit waste management company owned by 21 Maine municipalities. But recycling could actually save schools money, she said.

With trash there are two costs: transportation and disposal. “When you recycle you pay just the hauling cost. Recycling has no cost for disposal,” Labbe said.

Maine households aren’t doing much better than schools. More municipal trash is burned or buried than recycled.

Recycling in Maine climbed to a high of 42 percent in the late 1990s, but it’s slipped back over the last few years to 36.26 percent, White said. In 1990, Maine generated 1.1 million tons of municipal solid waste, compared to the current 2 million tons. “We’ve almost doubled the amount of waste in 16 or 17 years,” White said. “Recycling hasn’t kept pace.”

One bright spot is “huge interest” from students, he said. “Our office has seen an uptick in interest from schools starting recycling or compost programs.”

Labbe agreed. “We’ve had big success stories with recycling in schools.” Keenly aware of reducing carbon footprints, when someone presents a recycling idea, students grab hold, she said.

Labbe gives PowerPoint presentations at schools. “I love to ask them, ‘How much trash do you think your community makes each month?'” Students’ answers included the word pounds, when the correct word is tons. The actual amount of trash “blows their minds,” she said.

Now that the Wales students see how much paper is being thrown out, they’re more convinced. There was a lot of unnecessary trash, student Adam Priest said. Often, he’s just emptied a bin a day or two ago, and it’s filled to the top again, he said.

The Wales school custodian has noticed there’s a lot less trash, students said.

They want to encourage adults, some of whom don’t recycle because they say it’s too hard, student Reneigh Chick said. “That is a bad excuse. Here in Wales there’s not that much to do but recycle your cans and bottles.”

People don’t realize how much trash is going to landfills, so they don’t take the time, students said. And no one should use Styrofoam, said Bryanna Latulippe. “It doesn’t break down. You can’t burn it or recycle it.”

Since they’ve started recycling, the Wales students said they have noticed more recycling efforts by adults. They also want to change the behavior of younger students. By the time they get older, recycling will be a habit, Pagon said. “It’s something we’re all doing together to make it better.”