Como Park Senior High School's Environmental club, Greeneyez
What would you do if you had a lot of concern for the state of the environment and a lot of classmates joining you after school waiting for your direction? Freak out of course; at least a little. And then if you're anything like Larissa Sage and Dan Worku you would get down to business.
 Dan and Larissa had a problem that's also a luxury in most high school environmental clubs: lots of students showing up to the meetings. But how do you get action projects going fast enough with enough meaningful work for people who may move on? On top of that, they also had to deal with the fact that some of those students were there to earn extra credit.
To put it another way, lots of people meant lots of projects could get done but they had to plan the projects quickly. One of the greatest decisions they made early on was to assign projects to certain grades. These students were free to choose to do something else but in the meantime the seniors were assigned to "Energy Wars", juniors to "Paper" and freshmen and sophomores were assigned together to "air and water".
As soon as the juniors knew that paper production is hugely energy intensive, they were on a mission: to get the St Paul School District to switch to purchasing paper produced from 100% recycled fiber. Many adults reading this will probably see huge problems on the horizon; cost and bureaucracy.
 As Dan said, "the paper project started out slow and ran into roadblocks in the bureaucracy. After persevering, we were able to fight the cynics and get the backing of some powerful people."
These students have a huge success on their record for 2007. Principal Dan Mesick has authorized a test pilot in their school for using 100% recycled paper. The students know it will be successful because they did their homework and know that any quality issues with this paper are in the past. They also know ways to buy in bulk and keep the costs down.
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