Times Observer photo by Brian Ferry The Project Plastic team at St. Joseph Catholic School includes (from left) Magdalene Bennett, Ellen Straight, Adison Cullers, Emma Kisselbach, and Adriana Royo.

Fourth graders in Warren County are making a difference.

A group of students at St. Joseph Catholic School have started a recycling program — Project Plastic.

The girls run the daily part of the program as an assembly line.

From reaching into trash cans to dealing with whatever is on or in the bottles, it’s not glamorous work.

Ellen Straight collects the bottles out of the bin and hands them off to Magdalene Bennett and Adison Cullers.

Bennett rinses out each bottle and Cullers takes them to Emma Kisselbach at the next station.

“I shake them,” Kisselbach said.

“There’s usually stuff in them,” Straight said.

“Sometimes it’s disgusting,” Adriana Royo said.

Kisselbach hands them off to Royo.

“I dump them out,” Royo said.

They put all the clean bottles back in the bin and take caps to their classroom. They are making a Project Plastic sign out of the caps.

“In second grade I saw everyone throwing their plastic bottles away and I didn’t like it,” Royo said.

“The plastic bottles go to landfills and they build and build,” Cullers said. “Every time someone throws away something, it takes up more land.”

“When we run out of space for landfills, they might start taking up habitat space,” Kisselbach said.

“It hurts the animals,” Bennett said.

“My mom used to be a marine biologist,” Straight said. “She told me how many bottles she found in the ocean. It can hurt or kill some animals.”

“Plastic can become new things, like toys or chairs or car bumpers,” Cullers said.

“… or more plastic bottles,” Straight said.

Recycling is only part of the process.

“There are three things you should do,” Royo said. “Reduce, reuse, recycle.”

“Reduce means you do not use as much,” Bennett said.

“Reuse is when you use something again,” Kisselbach said.

“Recycling is ‘I don’t just chuck it away, I put it in the bin, it goes to a recycling center, and then it gets formed into something else,'” Cullers said.

The students feel good about doing their part for the environment.

“It makes me feel happy to think that everything is getting recycled and that animals and habitats will not be destroyed,” Straight said.