Parkview’s got a brand-new bag

A new type of fundraiser is helping Parkview Elementary School students learn about sustainability while keeping them healthy. Instead of candy bars, students will be selling ChicoBags through Nov. 17.

Colleen Kavanagh, a 42-year-old parent aide at Parkview, spearheaded efforts to partner with Chico Bag Co. proprietor Andy Keller for the pre-Christmas fundraiser. “It’s something new for us, and I like that we’re helping a local business,” she said while sitting at a child-size table labeling reading material at the school.

“It’s a good solution and benefits not only my business but the school as well,” Keller said.

Each ChicoBag, a reusable shopping bag, will sell for $5, of which $2.50 goes directly to the school. If each student sells 10 bags, the school could raise $12,500.

The goal is to raise money for supplies and future projects while increasing awareness about the environment and waste created by plastic bags.

“There needs to be a balance between something that is good for the environment and healthy for the kids,” Kavanagh said just minutes before a fundraising kickoff rally at the school Monday afternoon (Nov. 6). Students and teachers collected old plastic bags from home and tied them together to create a chain that would demonstrate how wasteful single-use bags are.

According to Californians Against Waste, a nonprofit environmental research and advocacy organization, each Californian uses 552 plastic bags per year, for a total of more than 19 billion plastic grocery and merchandise bags for the state. Keller notes that it takes as much as 14,000 barrels of oil per year just to support Chico residents’ use of plastic bags.

As soon as teachers were able to quiet down their students, Keller began his presentation. “Plastic bags never go away; they are here forever once they’re made,” he told the students. Keller then explained how plastic bags become scattered in creeks and oceans and later kill fish and other animals.

As Keller folded the nylon ChicoBag into its pouch and put it in his pocket, demonstrating how it works, students sat with looks of fascination. Keller encouraged them to use ChicoBags for their lunches, when they go shopping and even as gift wrap. Keller then asked the crowd what else they could use a ChicoBag for, and they burst into laughter when one teacher shouted out, “A hamster pillow!”

Students then walked out of the cafeteria clutching part of the plastic bag chain that stretched from where they were past the playground to the fence at the other end of campus. A student holding the front portion of the chain looked back to see how far it reached and said “Wow” as his jaw dropped.