Last year, a few dedicated students started an environmental club at Albany HS. With about six members working hard, meeting at least twice a week, we started with a recycling awareness campaign, educating students about recycling on campus. We did a survey of the school to see how students get to school, and were surprised that in our one-square-mile city, so many students drove to school every day. We held a fun event about waste at the school, giving prizes to students who correctly guessed how much garbage the school threw out on a regular basis. We even had a shoe recycling campaign to collect old athletic shoes to be made into track/playground surfaces. At the same time, we started working on the Albany Energy-Efficient Light Bulb campaign with the city to distribute environmentally-friendly CFL bulbs to the community.

By the end of the year, we had many plans for future projects and had been awarded grants for some of these projects. This school year, we started off with publicity and recruitment at our school's club rush day. Our club has at least doubled in size, and with more people, we've already been able to accomplish much more than last year! We finished presentations to the freshmen classes about campus recycling, a shoe recycling drive, a used battery drive, ordering new garbage and recycling cans for our campus, and much more-- even a donation drive for oil spill relief in November. We're planning on focusing on the expanding Better Bulb Campaign in the spring semester!

So many new projects are coming to us-- we have many more ideas for projects than we'll ever be able to do! It's scary and exciting at the same time, but what's best about it all is that even though our projects may seem small and insignificant, by working out from our school and community we've been able to make a huge difference. Our little city is becoming a leader in environmental activism, and even though it's only one square mile, hopefully Albany will inspire more cities to do the same.

To get in touch with the Albany High EarthTeam club and see everything we've been doing, check out our website!
http://www.myspace.com/ahsearthteam