North Central Green Week

Project Theme: Environmental sustainability

Target Audience and Location: North Central High School students in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Mission: To create an environment where sustainable waste reduction is available, and reuse is promoted while educating participants on how to live more sustainably.

Project Description: Scholar Sawyer Husain and educator Scholar Tom Gayda were always clear they wanted to focus their project on environmental justice with an emphasis on helping their community become more educated about and able to employ sustainable practices. In their community, especially at school, there was not a recycling program or encouragement and ways to reuse or recycle items.

The team decided their strategy would be to build a social media campaign, building excitement for their school community to engage in a different focus topic each day, specific to an attainable sustainable practice to try. The five-day experience focused on carbon footprint reduction, plastic waste prevention, fabric and fashion waste prevention and electronic recycling. It culminated in a shoe-drive at their school basketball game. They set up partnerships and provided incentives for people to participate and share what they had done to be more sustainable.

Sawyer reflected that, “We want our project to create more awareness, to educate our community on the importance of sustainability and recycling and to provide ways all students and families can participate. We aim to set a precedent that what is often thought of as “garbage” is not the only thing that creates waste, and in turn needs to be recycled. We want to promote the sustainable disposal of other non-apparent forms of waste that overpopulate landfills.”

Watch this team’s project presentation at our virtual showcase event!