The end of the school year is fast approaching. Twelve days for me, but who's counting? The end of school, in many grossly unrealistic teen movies, is often punctuated by kids gleefully throwing books and papers all over the hallway as they stick it to the man by trashing their locker before they head off for a summer of debauchery.

In reality, kids do have to clean out their lockers, and those of you with teens know how items in their possession tend to…accumulate, shall we say, over time. I've got students with textbooks, binders, notebooks, and paperbacks crammed into every square inch of their lockers. All that goes somewhere at the end of the year, and oftentimes, that place is the ginormous trash bins placed in the hallway to make end-of-year checkout move as smoothly and quickly as possible.

What's this got to do with green living? In my experience, the large majority of what gets thrown away at the end of the year is reusable or recycleable. With a little advanced preparation, and some prompting from teachers and parents, the piles of paper products, pencils, pens, etc., can be diverted from the trash and put to good use.

• Those old tests, worksheets, and papers that might not be fridge-worthy can easily be recycled: just make sure the trusty recycling bins are in just as convenient a place as trash bins.
• Start a school-supplies freestore. I easily did this by asking both teachers (we've got our own mess to clean up, as well) and students for still-usable three-ring binders, tablets, notebooks, writing utensils, looseleaf, markers, crayons, etc. Set up a collection table in a centrally-located area. Encourage kids to turn in items by swapping old items with summer-worthy trinkets like paperbacks, candy, pool passes, gift cards, etc. I use the collected items the following year for students who need supplies.
• Don't forget other recycleables: I guarantee that among the school-related items, their are surely soda bottles, aluminum cans, etc, that can also be recycled.
• Make sure there's a lost and found area: teens often borrow each others clothes, only to forget where they came from. Better they find their owner than end up in a landfill. Same with books, CDs, and other personal items.
• If you've got younger kids, make a trip to help your child clean out their locker without just pitching everything. Better yet, see if your PTO can help create a gently-used supply closet.

I'm lucky that I sponsor Student Council–this is an easy, but productive service project for my young activists.

Pssstt…You can do the same thing when you clean out your home office…

Conducting a waste audit is an excellent way for students and adults alike to realize how much “trash” is thrown away each day. My students and I, with the guidance and equipment of the lovely Katy Mike Smaistrla, Education Coordinator at the Earthways Center in St Louis, did a weeklong analysis of what is thrown away at our school, and the results provided awesome learning opportunities and project potential.

Long before the waste audit, which took place close to the end of the semester, my students went on a field trip to the Fred Weber landfill. There, they saw where our trash goes, how much space our metro community needs for its trash, and learned how a landfill is structured.

The waste audit itself took about a week. During that time, kids interviewed building officials, weighed and sorted classroom trash, and analyzed purchasing by the school. The counted copiers, students, fax machines, soda machines, printers, and dumpsters. Finally, they donned jumpsuits, gloves, and goggles and dove right into the dumpster to collect bags of trash, which were sorted into individual components and weighed.

Their findings were shocking. An overwhelmingly large amount of what we threw away can be reduced, reused, or recycled, and our school was doing none of that. We found blank paper in the trash, unopened snacks, and cardboard, paper, cans, and plastics that could easily be recycled. We found bagged yard waste, enormous amounts of styrofoam and disposable utensils, unopened sodas and snacks, and perfectly good books. Our Abitibi paper-recycling bin? Empty.

The students were now invested. They realized that they throw away a lot of stuff, and when they throw stuff away, it doesn’t disappear—it has to go somewhere. The next task was to create an implement a project that would, in some way, make our school more sustainable. Because the waste audit was fresh in the students minds, their projects focused on solid waste reduction and reusing.

In only a few shorts weeks, the students were able to start a school-wide paper recycling program, designed and run by students. They also designated one of the school computer printers as a “draft printer,” printing on the blank side of previously used paper. Finally, students are currently working on recycling 20oz plastic bottles (the plastic most commonly discarded at our school) through Terra Cycle. Teachers and students are working together to decrease our waste, and later in the spring, we will do another waste audit to measure the impact these projects are having.