By Skagway’s 4th-6th Grade Planet Protectors

 We are the Planet Protectors, and we work together to keep the city clean and talk to community members and business owners about how to be more environmentally friendly and respectful towards nature in our small community. We recently paid for a small recycling station for our school thanks to support from our community; we are grateful to the Westmark Hotel and Garden City Markets for their generous donations which made this possible! We make many efforts to help our town become greener. For example, before we purchased the recycling station, we started to collect paper from most classrooms every month and began bringing it up to a recycling facility in Whitehorse.

If you are in Skagway and want to help decrease the amount of garbage that we send to the incinerator, please join us in recycling the following materials:

• Aluminum, glass, and cardboard can all be recycled beside the Municipality of Skagway composting building across from the Dyea turn-off. 

• Paper cannot be recycled in Skagway, but the school and the library both collect paper to recycle in Whitehorse.

• Unfortunately, plastic cannot be recycled in Skagway but we encourage you to find other uses for it to reduce and reuse!

• Food waste can be dropped off next to the municipal composting building, where it is turned into usable soil.

While recycling is great and a much better alternative to trash, we encourage you to think about how to reduce the amount of waste that you generate overall. Reduce your consumption and reuse whenever possible. First try to reduce, then think about how to reuse, then recycle!

On behalf of Skagway’s Planet Protectors and the environment, we thank you for your support!