Bag lady spreads the green

May 01, 2008 11:51 pm

— ASHTABULA — She calls herself the greatest bag lady in the world, but she’s really an environmental educator from Marietta.
Kathy Bartunek of GT Environmental gave several lively presentations Thursday to classes at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School. With the use of visual aids, she covered recycling, landfill operations, composting, waste reduction, household hazardous waste and other solid-waste topics.
“She’s very energetic,” teacher Allison Park said. “She also just happens to be my future mother-in-law. The kids will like her.”
Park was correct.
Holding up a brown paper bag to a class of third and fourth-graders, Bartunek asked what they would do with it. Some of the answers she received were: use for a craft or reuse it at a store.
“At my house, I would reuse it again and again,” Bartunek said. “When I go grocery shopping, I take my own bags.”
Thus, the bag-lady designation, she said.
When the brown bag becomes too worn to carry anything, Bartunek feeds it to the worms in her compost pile.
“Worms love brown paper,” she said.
Bartunek took along many other items to demonstrate how just about anything can be recycled, including an old shoe.
“This old shoe will take 50 years to deteriorate at a landfill,” she said. “Recycle it. Give it to Goodwill.”
Recycled tennis shoes can be made into material for playgrounds and running tracks. The same goes for tires.
“Rubber tires are no longer just for growing mosquitoes,” Bartunek said. “Now, it’s for a running track or mulch for flower beds.”
She pulled out a bunch of white grocery plastic bags and asked, “Do you know what they call these at the landfill?”
Nobody knew.
“White birds, because they fly,” she said. “The wind catches them, and they fly.”
It takes 500 years for those bags to break down, she said.
Plastic bottles are the worst: 1 million years to break down.
“Recycle. Recycle,” she said, noting that carpeting and more plastic bottles can be made from plastic bottles.
Bartunek’s pet peeve is Styrofoam cups.
“I love to drink coffee,” she said. “When I travel, I carry my own mug.”
After the presentations, Bartunek said the students were a wonderful audience.
“They all had very good questions,” she said.
It’s no wonder the students at Thomas Jefferson enjoyed Bartunek’s presentation so much. Previous to this career, she was a licensed teacher for more than 33 years for numerous school systems across Ohio.

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