By Naomi Smith George and Arianna Pincay, juniors at World Journalism Preparatory School in Queens, New York.

Our environmental club started off the school year with a number of project ideas. The first project we decided to take on was fixing our recycling program.

Students and teachers at our school had the bad tendency to throw garbage into the recycling bins. We decided to address this problem by using cardboard to make lids for the bins and cutting slots in them so that people could only put paper in them. In most classrooms the students and faculty paid attention to the lids and our efforts of keeping garbage out of the recycling bins were really working! However, in the other classrooms some of the bins lids were ripped, broken, and mis-used.

So, we established a plan to use the ACE Action Grant that we won to buy supplies for decorating the lids. This way people would pay more attention to them and hopefully respect them and use them properly. Our whole club has been completely dedicated to making these lids. We have all given up our lunch and after school time to make and repair them to help the students and faculty of our school to properly recycle.

In addition to decorating the bin lids, we have further plans to decorate the bins themselves. We hope that this will help the bins to stand out as both functional and as pieces of artwork, and thus increase recycling participation at our school. Since we have nearly come to the end of the year, we hope to save this decorating activity for the upcoming year.

Another project that our environmental club decided to take on this year was bottle collecting! About 2-3 weeks before Earth Day, our club president proposed the idea of having a school- wide can and bottle collecting contest to promote recycling at school and home. We all thought it was a great idea so we started it off by giving large plastic bags to each advisory homeroom. Using the school broadcast system, we encouraged all of the students and advisors to bring in cans and bottles with weekly reminders. The advisories worked really hard to collect the most cans and bottles to earn the reward of a pizza party. We announced the winning advisory that day on our school broadcast show and the winning advisory collected over 700 cans and bottles!

Additionally, the Friday before Earth Day this year we held another contest to see who could wear the most green in honor of Earth Day. The winner would receive an AMC gift card. The winner of this contest really earned it: she even spray painted her hair green!

The club also wanted to do a planting project in celebration of Earth Day. We had some open dirt space in the school yard and decided to try and plant there.

We wrote a proposal and got it approved. We then talked to the janitors about using their supplies (shovels, rakes, etc.) We talked to the PTA who offered to donate money to our project. With the help of our school janitor, we went to home depot and bought a weeping cherry tree as well as several shrubs and bushes to use as bases. On Friday April 17th the club planted the shrubs and the tree and now we are going to have a fundraiser so we can buy over 200 flowers to fill in the rest of the space.

We also plan to do a beach clean up. We plan to go to a specific beach, with the necessary materials to clean up garbage and recyclables that we see on the beach. We may plan to partner up with another club in our school that focuses on charity and publications for helping others, and organizations: the ‘Do Something’ club!

We have one last project ahead of us: a locker cleanout day. On the second to last day of school, we plan to have the students of WJPS clean out their lockers while we’ll collect donations of what they don’t want anymore: things like pencils/pens, that haven’t really been used much and are in good shape. We’ll assign two club members at every hall of lockers to walk around with recycle bins for paper, garbage bins for garbage, and donation boxes for things that are not wanted and are in good shape for reuse!

This past year has been very productive. We have achieved a lot, and we are hoping that we can achieve much more for the remaining year and years to come with the WJPS environmental club. We have many more ideas and activities in store for our school to take part in and events that we hope our school will enjoy.

We have a lot ahead of us, and with determination and passion we will accomplish everything we set our minds to!