The start of a new year brings new resolutions, and for the AP Environmental Science students, juniors Emily Leung, Serena Lin, Samantha Samoylenko, and Gracie Wong, their plan is to go the extra mile with their class project called “We Can Change the World.”
The purpose of this APES project is to recycle the school’s paper lunch trays. Every time students buy lunches from the cafeteria, the food comes in disposable trays, which can accumulate to a large amount of waste.
To minimize the amount of trash in the school, the APES group aims to promote recycling lunch trays by distributing recycling bins in various areas across the school campus and placing them next to regular school trash cans. Students are encouraged to recycle their lunch trays by putting them in the special recycling bins that are conveniently located right next to the trash bins.
“I personally think that this project has a lot of promise, because it addresses a main problem in this school, which is the excess of trash,” Lin said. “We often hear [the principal] making announcements about picking up our trash at lunch, which shows how great of an issue that the trash excess at our school is. I hope that this project can help minimize the school’s trash problem to the point that [the principal] feels less of a need to make these announcements.”
The project is a three-week long event that will be in operation from Jan. 27 to Feb. 14. At the end of each week, the APES students, along with the help of members of another club, will count the recycled lunch trays everyday after school.
Once their project is completed, the four APES students will submit a report about their project to the Siemens’ “We Can Change the World” challenge, a national contest that encourages high school students to identify an environmental issue and provide a solution. Other students from Hong’s class will also be participating in this contest with their projects.
“I just hope that the students get a sense of how much of a difference one person or a small group of people can make in their world. I hope they can come to understand that everybody has the capability ability to make changes to the world,” APES teacher David Hong shared.