Never Too Young

Case of the Dirty Dishes

It's lunchtime at Thomasville High School in North Carolina, and most students are thinking about the food piling up on their trays. Not Brian Styers, a 16- year-old honors student. He is thinking about the trays themselves -- and the nondegradable plastic used to make them. Bothered by the fact that school- issued Styrofoam trays, plates and cups were choking the local landfill, Styers and a dozen or so like-minded students began marching through the cafeteria earlier this year carrying reusable dishes brought from home. They were branded "tree huggers" and "crazy," but Styers and his friends persisted. They did their homework, figuring the cost of recycling schemes. They tipped off the local media. And they repeated their protest every Wednesday. In March they took their appeal to the school board, topping it off with a well-rehearsed pitch for recycling Styrofoam. Their determination paid off. Starting this month, used lunchware from three Thomasville schools will be collected in plastic bags, shipped to Brooklyn and turned into rulers, insulation board and reusable lunch trays.

A Children's Can-Collecting Crusade

What can one boy or girl do to preserve the world's rain forests? Ask Jiro Nakayama. He's the twelve-year-old leader of a band of schoolchildren in Nagano, Japan, who have already saved 40 acres of forest land in Costa Rica. On their way to and from school, they collect old newspapers and empty aluminum cans for sale to a recycling plant at 63 cents per kg. The proceeds, augmented by donations from parents and neighbors, are sent to the International Children's Rainforest Program, which buys and preserves virgin parkland at the rate of $50 an acre. So far, Jiro and his friends have raised more than $5,000.

The program began in Sweden, where some 100,000 schoolchildren, helped by matching government grants, have been able to buy 160,000 acres of Costa Rican forest. A similar venture affiliated with the Nature Conservancy has enlisted thousands of U.S. students to preserve 110,000 acres of tropical parkland in Belize. Among the participants: a class of autistic children in the Bronx who cashed in enough cans to buy an acre of species-rich jungle.