In the short two months that school has been in session, the Green Team has worked on keeping the school on a path to become more environmentally friendly. The Green Team has been holding presentations at events such as the Silicon Valley Youth Wireless Conference.
On top of this, the Green Team helped get the school recertified as a “green business” by the Santa Clara County last June and was given an award for the recertification. The Green Team has since shifted its focus to new projects.
Bay Area Green Conference
Members of the Green Team have frequently gone to conferences to discuss environmental issues, but most found them to be of little benefit.
“A lot of our members have gone to conferences that are run by adults and supposed to benefit high schoolers,” Green Team co-president senior Wendy Wu said. “They just simply don’t work. We just don’t take anything away from [them] and it doesn’t help our school.”
The ensuing idea was to organize a “green” conference for high school students from around the Bay Area.
“We thought that we’d organize our own conference, kind of like a ‘by high schoolers, for high schoolers’ kind of thing,” Wendy said. “The general premise is that we’ll have a bunch of schools from the Bay Area come. We’ll split off into groups and a representative from each school will be in a group and then we’ll discuss project ideas.”
Although the initial plan was to hold a green conference sometime in October, complications with Google, the company which initially offered to sponsor the program, prevented this from happening. Despite the initial setback, Green Team co-president senior Sarah Jacobs was eventually able to convince Google to host the conference. The conference will be held on Saturday, November 9, at the Google campus in Mountain View. Twenty-two schools from around the Bay Area are expected to attend the conference.
Anything But Car Days
Last year, walk-to-school days were held throughout the school year. This year, the Green Team is trying to maintain a consistent “walk-to-school” schedule by designating one to two days of each month as Anything But Car (ABC) Days
“[ABC days are] when we try to motivate LAHS students to walk or bike instead of driving,” junior Meredith Soward said. “We’re still working on ideas for how to actually change people’s habits and we’re thinking [of using] food [as] motivation i.e. the second period class with the most bikers gets a pizza party.”
The Green Team has been working with Safe Moves, a non-profit organization from Mountain View, to educate people about traffic safety. Last year, Safe Moves not only paid for a majority of the ingredients for the smoothies that were distributed during the bike-to-school days, but also lent the Green Team a blender bike, which blends smoothies as the rider sits on the bike and pedals.
This year, the Green Team has decided to retain the raffle system where a green team member hands out tickets to environmentally friendly commuters. In order to counter the problem of participation, the team hopes to be able to entice more people into participating in ABC days by offering better rewards. In addition to receiving a free smoothie from one of Safe Moves’ blender bikes, students who were given a ticket by Green Team are also registered in a raffle for a 15 dollar gift card.
The first ABC day will be tomorrow, October 30.
Sorting Trash
The Green Team introduced a new trash sorting system to the school last year. Trash cans were either labeled “Compost” for organic foodstuffs or “Recycling” for anything else that was inedible. Items that were stained with food, such as food wrappers and plates, were still classified as “recyclable.”
In the new sorting system, the Green Team has managed to eliminate waste bins entirely. Over the course of a year, the sticker-labels on the school’s trash cans have become worn, some even peeling off. This has prompted the school’s administration to purchase a new set of trash cans earlier this month. These new domed trash bins are color-coded blue for recycling and green for composting, continuing the school’s efforts toward being green.
The lack of a garbage bin leaves the onus of coming up with a way to ensure that the student body puts its waste in the right bins on the Green Team. The team is currently brainstorming how to advertise the most efficient way to use the new trash cans and how best to develop a system that ensures that students sort their trash.
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