A call to recycle

Bottom: Tom Grosh, left, was given the Certificate of Merit Award from the Washington County Commissioner for his role in the phone book collection.

In this digital age, there are some kids who have never looked in a phone book, and a few who don’t even know such a thing exists. But, thanks to Tom Grosh, students of the Washington County School System in Maryland now not only know what a phone book looks like, but also learned a valuable lesson about recycling.

Grosh, who owns Grosh’s Lawn Service in Clear Spring, Md., along with the help of now retired recycling coordinator Harvey Hoch, decided to start The Washington County Phone Book Recycling Contest.

For three years, the students in the Washington County School systems have collected and recycled used phone books so they can be kept out of the waste stream. This contest also raises awareness about the importance of recycling in the area. In 2011, more than 9,700 phone books were collected by 13 participating Washington County Public Schools. This year, the group collected more than 10,000 phone books, which is the first time that number has been eclipsed.

“I knew that if we could get the kids interested in this during the week of Earth Day – there would be other projects going on that week – we would allow them to see that they made a difference from the stacks of phone books,” he says. “As they say ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ but in this case they could see just how much space these phone books will use up in our landfill.”

Grosh said every family has phone books, so it was easy to drum up interest in the project because every child could participate by donating.

“This project is growing each year and kids are finding ways to find more books,” he says. “Some schools kept graphs to show the progress each day of how many books were collected and some schools set a collection table with student-made posters.”