Lanikai kids, ‘grannies’ team to fight Mylar trash

You would not believe the amount of Mylar kids throw away. At one little school, they calculated 80,000 pieces a year. And that’s a school that’s paying attention to the problem and trying to make changes.

Lily Pu’s second-grade grandson stopped her from throwing away a Doritos bag. “He told me, ‘Puna, that’s Mylar!’”

The students at Lanikai School all know to scrupulously separate their trash, even beyond paper and plastic. The school embarked on a zero-waste environmental program this year, and one part has brought a new focus to the problem of Mylar. Far beyond the silvery balloons, Mylar is used in packaging many of the food products kids bring to school: chips, juice pouches, granola bars, packages of dried fruit — sometimes, the healthier the food, the thicker its Mylar package.

They’ve been keeping records. The school of 330 students from grades K-6 generates between 400 and 450 pieces of Mylar a day. That’s enough to fill an 18-gallon storage bin.

“A chip bag for snack, a chip bag for lunch, it adds up quickly,” says Ed Noh, director of the public charter school.

On campus, there are no trash cans, only separation stations. The Mylar bins are full almost daily.

Pu teamed up with her friends Lynn Lundquist, who also has a grandchild at the school, and Adele Wilson, who lives nearby, and formed the Lanikai Grannies to help the school figure out what to do with all this waste.

The three started crafting. Lundquist experimented with cutting up the packages and rolling them into beads on a spindle and stringing these into colorful necklaces. Wilson began sewing juice boxes into cute, durable tote bags and purses. Pu made a charming woven pencil case with a zippered closure out of 62 Cheetos bags. “That’s two classrooms, one snack,” Noh says.

The smaller pieces, the ones that can’t be turned into a bracelet or a purse, are being made into sound-buffers to be installed in the noisy cafeteria. “I’m calling it ‘acoustical apparatus art installation,’” says Mindy Jaffe, who helps organize the school’s environmental programs through a grant. She plans to help students take decibel readings of the cafeteria noise before and after the Mylar “flowers” are installed on the ceiling.

But the Lanikai Grannies say the craft projects will only get them so far. They’re so labor-intensive and each piece of Mylar has to be washed and cleaned thoroughly before it can be reused. They’ll sell their crafts as a fundraiser for the school’s environmental program, but what they really hope for is awareness.

“People ask me about the beads and I say they’re made of Mylar and they go, ‘What?’” Lundquist said. “They have no idea.”

The students have become teachers in their homes and communities, telling people that Mylar doesn’t decay, it can’t be recycled, and there are no big up-cycling programs in Hawaii as there are on the mainland. Parents are starting to make changes like buying food products that don’t come in Mylar packaging, packing juice in washable containers, and buying a large bag of chips and packing smaller portions into reusable bags. The Grannies have even created reusable sandwich and snack bags out of Mylar.

For Halloween, the Grannies made Noh a grand cape and headpiece made out of Mylar packages. When the students asked him what he was, he joked, “I’m your conscience!”

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com