Eastern Plumas Health Care has joined forces once again with Portola Jr./Sr. High School in an effort to help not just the local community, but the global one as well. On Earth Day, April 22, 2015, members of the high school Leadership Class (from left Tabi Martinez, Hope Gallup, and Jocelyn Bates), principal Sara Sheridan, and EPHC’s Alanna Collier-Wilson and Linda Satchwell, joined together to begin a joint recycling program. The recycling bin arrived from Intermountain Disposal just in time for Earth Day. Members of the Leadership class will have recycle boxes in every classroom, and they’ll empty them into the large bin daily. EPHC receives a huge amount of junk mail and creates a large amount of non-patient related paper waste, which Martinez and Bates will pick up twice a week. EPHC’s private health information waste paper is shredded, kept in locked bins on the hospital campus, and also recycled. Satchwell said that Earth Day started when she’d just entered high school, and it gave her hope to see this current group of high school students so dedicated to the recycling effort. Bates, the prime mover behind the student project with Gallup, said she was counting the days until she got her driver’s license so she could pick up the hospital’s recycling herself.