EcoGrace

Band Night Location

Oops! And the band night will be at the HS, through the doors to the right of to the main entrance, and down the sloping main hallway to what will be human ecology euphoria!  :)

Band Night

Merry Winter Break/Christmas everyone!

Our band night will be Friday, January 4th, 2008(!) @ 7 (until 10). It is open to the community, however the bulk of attendees will be John Jaysters. Admission is $5 and the proceeds go to our clubs funds for our next venture/probably something justice related.

Featuring: Many outstanding bands and...
-reduced admission if you bring batteries/cell phones/printer cartridges to be recycled at our recycling station debut
-an attempt to make this event very low waste
-something interactive with the facts and projects posted in the adjacent hallway by JJ students on environmental issues
-recommendations on books to read
-free fair trade coffee if you bring your own mug (E Club is making travel mugs/mugs cool!)
-*tentative* sale of Eclub self-designed organic t-shirts ($15)...if not then, in the weeks following.
-probable JJ TV coverage
-information on wellness at JJ

Anyone interested in helping us to promote the event, please leave a post. Also, what's the easiest way  to go carbon neutral at this late notice? And, can we get a copy of the 10% video to be showing alongside the recycling station?

See you there!

-EClub

Great gift idea!

Click here for the site of a company which offers timers for your shower wall to reduce the # of gallons you use every day. It's astounding how much water we could save by reducing shower time by a minute or two. A relatively efficient shower head spews out 2.5 gallons a minute, therefore by reducing your shower time by one minute, you alone are saving 913 gallons per year!

We'll have plenty of updates about E club band night and more by tomorrow (after our meeting). Also check out jjhs.klschools.org for weekly (updated every Monday) environmental tips from our club! Please feel free to leave us suggestions for future tips.

Recycling Station in the Works and Much More

Today's meeting accomplished many things

1) Finalized idea for a recycling station, to be intriguingly presented and manned throughout the day be Eclub members. We will display, as a visual, 7 or 8 different clear plastic cubes, each with either batteries, cell phones, plastic bottles/other plastics, cardboard, newspapers, paper, and trash filling them. They will all be on a tabletop with 7 corresponding holes, which will be connected to a trash bag, school recycling bin or separate collection container for the cell phones and batteries. Everything but the trash will be recycled. The idea is to get students/faculty/monitors/administrators to come with anything they were planning to throw away and learn how to dispose of it properly.

*Many of the school recycling bins are near overflowing after the ripple effect of the article in the school newspaper and our signs!!*

2) We are working to get the high school, then hopefully the district, buying wind energy in addition to our normal NYSEG energy bills. If they are unable to provide the funds, we will gladly fundraise.

3) We will hopefully be presenting a green tip of the day, every day, after Mr. Leprine's Quote of the Day in the morning announcements. This tip will also be appearing on the school home page.

4) Hopefully we can get a speaker to come speak to/with students after school. Our goal is to get a lot of people involved by engaging the health classes (mandatory for 10th graders, attendance could count as the course project), as well as science or social studies classes for extra-credit. Right now, we're hoping for John Hall, as he is very involved in these issues and our representative.

5) Check back next week!

Portable Battery

Seniors from the Walkabout program of Westchester are putting together a portable battery that will hopefully be used to power most if not all of the 15 computers in their work-study room. The battery will be attached to and powered by a solar panel and bicycle, which together create sustainable and renewable energy.  The students will also be traveling to various schools to give presentations about their work on the battery and how it will begin to change and better energy use if put in to place elsewhere.

Good News

We had a meeting with the director of waste management for the district about our recycling system. The high schools system was once set the standard, and has since fallen into disrepair. We have a company that will take sort through anything that can be recycled, all we have to do is put *CLEAN* recyclables into the "comingle" classic blue bins. The problem lies in contamination of the good stuff by half empty soda cans and laziness mixed with miseducation on what to recylcle on the part of many in the school. We're hoping to change that and our efforts to educate everyone about recyling will be monitored by the custodians to track our effectiveness. We hope to also feed some paper back to the printers, there's no need to waste a whole other good side! Another big thing will be advocating the cleanthliness of the school's water, which has gotten a bad rep. This way, people will be encouraged to refill and reuse. (Hopefully with their siggs!)

We are working to get a "Green Tip of the Week" up on the districts or at least high school's homepage so that people read the tip when they're in a position to take action (in their own home). Also, for anyone from the high school who maybe reading this, check out some of the new books the librarians have featured, there are a ton of really great environmental books out there. (Although, between the eclub members, we're hogging quite a bit of them :) )

Also, "in the news" there will be an article on recycling in the high school in the next publication of the school run Focus paper.

P.S. check out www.earthle.com, same search engine as google, but a black screen to decrease energy used! Very cool.

E Club Happenings

First, a correction. Our Band Night Fundraiser will be the first weekend after break in January, not February.

Secondly, we have decided to choose a different environmental issue each month, starting with November, and raise awareness about it using the large wall across from the library as our medium. The overarching issue for the year will be climate change, and hopefully we can bring some speakers to the school and engage a good number of students. We will also hopefully be sponsoring a "green tip of the week" on the district and/or high school web page, because we figure that is the most frequently trafficked with many students logging on to their echalk accounts. The figures are astounding when considering how a simple change made by everyone or even one in 2 people in the high school could impact CO2 emissions, other types of pollution, and natural resource depletion.

Another thing we will be working on throughout the year will be putting a recycling system in place, and educating students and staff about what goes where.

We'll keep you posted!

Results of our 1st meeting

We had a good turnout this past Wednesday, and discussed some ideas for the coming year. They include: using the wall across from the library as a medium for educating students, doing a fundraiser in school before the holidays of sensible gifts that are environmentally friendly and actually useful, setting up a plastics recycling system, planting native species on campus, continuing our no idling campaign, engaging students in environmentally related contests...etc. etc. We will additionally be doing a band night the first weekend in February.

Great news on last years sigg campaign as well, SIGG USA is hoping to launch a program in schools modeled partly on what we did last year. If anyone has pictures of our sculpture from the event, please let us know. Thanks!

More to come! Check back by next Wednesday.

E Club Kick Off

After school on Wednesday, October 3rd the Environmental Club will have it's first "official" meeting. We will discuss plans for the year and welcome many new members. There will be another post after the meeting discussing our agenda and opening the floor for any comments. :) 

Environmental info on the 2008 Prez. Candidates

Not to bring up politics, but the seniors of 2008 will be voting for the first time in the next presidential election. Let's not wait until they come up with passable ideas...if our environmental justice movement is strong enough, the proper leaders will step up. We shouldn't focus too much time on the platforms of the current candidates 1 1/2 years in advance...let's continue making demands for them to satisfy. Grist is starting an interesting series of interview on environmental issues with all the presidential hopefuls, many whom I've never heard of before. Read about the 1st one here.