Recycling Randy: new sustainability coordinator for Clarke County School District
The Athens-Clarke County landfill is expected to completely fill up by 2060. New Clarke County School District Sustainability Coordinator Randy Priest hopes to tackle that problem one school at a time.
A former physics teacher at Cedar Shoals, Priest left CCSD in 2023 to pursue his masters degree in natural resources at the University of Georgia. Returning under this new sustainability role, Priest aims to make every one play a role in the effort for sustainability in CCSD.
“I work for everybody. I’ve talked to the purchasing people about how we can make sure that the products we’re buying are more sustainable. I talked to the construction workers about making sure that the choices we make when picking the materials in our construction projects are sustainable. I talked to the custodial staff to think through how we’re thinking about and what we need to improve regarding our recycling programs at schools,” Priest said.
In his time at Cedar, Priest developed a strong friendship with music technology teacher Aaron Price, who thinks the new job is a perfect fit for Priest.
“For (Priest’s) thesis in his masters program he wrote a big paper about why school systems need a sustainability coordinator. He submitted that to CCSD, and they said ‘great, we’re gonna hire one,” Price said.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day and there’s a lot that has to happen and that it’s going to take
some time to do. It’s going to take some learning and some growing pains for all the people
who are doing the work, and it’s not an issue that will change overnight,”
Even though he only recently started working for the county the job has been very hands on. Priest, along with other people in the sustainability community, sorted through all trashbags from Whit Davis Elementary. They found that many trashbags were almost half full of recycling and could be taken to be repurposed rather than being thrown in a landfill with non-reusable trash.
“We learned through our waste sorting of every trash bag that 49% of the waste at Whit Davis could be diverted from the landfill. We were only diverting 3%. There’s a lot of room for change, and there are some little easy things that we can do,” Priest said. “At some point we stopped using clear bags for recycling bins and instead we switched to black bags. If you put a black bag in the recycle dumpster, it’s going to go to the landfill. It’s not going to go to recycling at all, because the people who go through that recycling don’t know if there’s anything dangerous in it, so they store it away in the landfill.”
Price says he is ready to see his friend execute changes because of inconsistencies between school sites.
“We do a lot of recycling stuff here, but we do it differently than Clarke Central and Hilsman do it. When all of the schools are doing it differently, it’s nice to have one person whose whole job is just looking for grants and organizing how we’re going to do all of these different things to make our county more sustainable,” Price said.
Although Priest is excited for what is to come he knows that change does not happen overnight.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day and there’s a lot that has to happen and that it’s going to take some time to do. It’s going to take some learning and some growing pains for all the people who are doing the work, and it’s not an issue that will change overnight,” Priest said.
