The Green Team is collecting recyclables from every classroom on Fridays during fourth period to encourage people to be more thoughtful about the environment.

“We want kids to know that it’s open for joining so if anybody wants to join, they can there are no requirements,” Green Team sponsor and AP environmental teacher Emily Harter said. “The only thing they have to have is just a passion for the environment and helping out.”

The Green Team picks up recycling from all over the school during fourth period lunch, and they have after-school meetings on Tuesdays from 4:25–5:15 p.m.

“Students who don’t have fourth period lunch typically can’t recycle with the Green Team since there’s not really a period for Green Team, so we just have to pick when most kids have lunch,” Harter said. “Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to come up with a plan for the kids that don’t have fourth lunch, yet we do hope to in the future.

Even though some students participating in this service are not able to recycle with the rest of the team they still could help in some way on or off campus.

“Starting freshman year, I wanted to start something at Chisolm because we haven’t had anything to address the issue on what the planet is going through,” president and founder of the Green Team senior Phillip Lasley said.

Lasley started to grow a passion for recycling and helping the planet in middle school and began to act on it as soon as he came to CTHS and started the Green Team service in 2019-2020.

“At first it was just me and one other member on the green team and then we began to expand the Green Team by recruiting students at lunch,” Lasley said. “I just want for the Green Team to help spread awareness on campus to other people so they will in turn, think about their own actions and try and transfer that into their own lives.”

The goal of this service is just to bring awareness to what is going on in our environment, and to just inspire people to simply lend a helping hand.

“We can only make a limited impact but were trying to get people to understand the planet in a different Lense, that way hopefully people will learn to make a change on their own,” Lasley said.

Even though this service is in action some students still don’t know about it and still chose not to recycle such as junior Isabella Elizondo.

“I don’t really think about recycling and how it can make an impact on our environment,” Elizondo said. “It’s not that I don’t care for the environment. Recycling just doesn’t really come to my mind. There probably is a solution to get me in the habit of recycling, but I wouldn’t try much.”