Green Club Projects & Ideas

Know Your Impact

• One of the first steps in encouraging people to participate in green initiatives is making them aware of the impact their behaviors have on the environment. Community nights or other public events that offer tabling spaces are a suitable place to help community members calculate their estimated carbon footprints. Several independent organizations offer online calculators for estimating a household's environmental impact. Transform a green club table into a kiosk where members interview community members and use a software program to calculate their carbon footprints. Tracking the nightly estimates on a poster is a visible way for community members to see that all of their choices add up to have a large impact on the environment. Another option is to include a chart of the average carbon footprints of countries around the world to see which areas are doing the largest environmental damage.

Recycling Competition

• Friendly competition is an incentive that encourages community or school members to participate in green initiatives such as recycling. If your school has a recycling program, consider turning it into a challenge in which classrooms compete to have the highest recycling rate. For younger kids, a recycling bin decorating contest kicks off the initiative, while older kids may be encouraged to participate if a prize such as a pizza party for the best-performing class is involved. One of the simplest ways to compare the rooms is to weigh the bins and keep a chart posted in a hallway of the school so rooms can keep track of their progress.

Planting Ceremonies

• Arbor Day is recognized nationally as the day to give back to the environment by planting a tree, but a green club doesn't need to wait until Arbor Day to encourage planting. One way a green club may encourage planting is to host a raffle; instead of buying a raffle ticket for a prize item, entrants plant a tree, garden bed or shrub in their yard to be entered for the drawing. Another option is to recruit science teachers at local schools to hold a yearly botany unit in which classrooms plant and care for their own flowers or vegetable gardens on school property; each class may use a different watering method or fertilize, then compare the effects of each on the growth rates of plants.