The Go Green Initiative's School of the Week: Branham High School in San Jose, CA!
by Kenny Luna, North Babylon, NY on 03.18.08
As Matt Zehner, the SPARE advisor at this week’s school of the week often says, "It only took 56 people to sign the Declaration of Independence, and that didn't turn out too badly…" And SPARE (Students Promoting Awareness of Recycling & the Environment) is a small but motivated group of high schoolers from Branham High School in San Jose, CA who are certainly making a difference at this week’s school of the week.
In fact, Branham was chosen as a demonstration school during the 2007 Go Green Earth Summit last fall, where those attending the Summit got to see up close and personal just how incredible their work at this school is.
For starters they established a school-wide recycling program for cans, bottles, paper, and just about everything else you can recycle, reducing the school’s solid waste bill by 20%. Then, they partnered up with a company in China to sell them recycled cell phones, chargers and batteries.
And that’s not all, because they also created an Adopt-a-Garden to beautify the school by using the proceeds from recycling, and wound up planting over 50 trees on campus. A cool, green solution that makes their school a more inviting place to be as well.
To top it all off they’ve committed to purchasing more than 26 hectares of Amazonian rainforest to offset the school’s 2008 carbon emissions using a $10,000 grant won from British Petroleum.
A very cool solution indeed.
So congrats to everyone at Branham High School that's making a difference as a part of SPARE!
See also: Strange, Contagious Disease Striking School Photocopy Machines
via:: Go Green Initiative
Wow! How inspiring!
I'm truly impressed and am passing all your inspiration on to our school's new Go Green Team.
Thank you,
Heather Cooper
Yay! This is my hometown! Glad to see the kids gettin involved with things like this!
This is what we ALL should do! If everyone tried this hard, the carbon emissions would go down a lot! We would be able to BREATH without worrying that we'd get a lung full of carbon dioxide instead of oxygen! Keep it up people!