By Jenny Wolan, Dundee Crown High School, Algonquin, Illinois

I hear students at my school talking about ways to green up their homes. They have big plans but it turns out, a lot of parents would consider going green more of a fashion statement than an actual improvement…

I’ve heard so many parents’ excuses about why they don’t make changes at home to help out the environment. I often hear: “it’s too expensive,” or “global warming can’t be proven.”
Their comments made me a little upset and recently, I wanted to figure out how to persuade parents that making a difference doesn’t have to be costly.
Recently, my Climate Coolers action team created a poster explaining all the ways you can green up your holidays and we targeted teachers.
We put up the poster in the environmental science room at Dundee Crown High School and used it to educate parents during parent-teacher
conferences.
Here’s one holiday tip we shared on the poster: recycle your Christmas tree. It’s a great way to slash waste after you’ve gotten together with your family for the holidays.

The poster provided facts on how many Christmas trees are actually sold each year and how to find places that recycle them.

Recycling your real Christmas tree is so important to the environment. Here’s why:

Just one tree absorbs more than one ton of CO2 throughout its lifetime. Also 33 million real trees are sold in the United States every year and there are more than 4,000 tree recycling programs to choose from.

So you are probably wondering how can you reuse a Christmas tree? Most trees are turned into woodchips for playgrounds or put to decompose on a landscape. Even better, some are actually used to prevent soil erosion on lake and river shorelines.

With such easy ways to recycle your Christmas tree, how could you not recycle it?

Hopefully parents from Dundee Crown will take our information and dispose of their trees in an eco-friendly way.
The best feeling from this project is knowing that we’ve accomplished more than just eating a turkey over holidays, we know that parents in our community are more educated about how to keep our earth healthy.
I hope these projects will grow and expand to other schools and eventually get more parents interested in helping the planet and clubs.