Two Parkway North Teams Compete in National Lexus Eco Challenge

Thirty thousand dollars and a healthy planet are on the line. The winning team of the national Lexus Eco Challenge will win a grand prize of $30,000 in grants and scholarships for their project that makes their community greener. This year, Parkway North has two teams as finalists for this grand prize.

“Basically we right now are trying to make our community greener. That’s the challenge,” said freshman Aerin Leigh Lammers. “There’s two different teams. One’s working mostly with pesticides and different pollinators. They have a petition online. The other team is mostly working with Parkway middle schools and Parkway elementary schools on vermicomposting, which is a smaller scale composting to teach kids how composting works.”

The team working with the Parkway schools (Aditya Gokhale, Abby Lammers, Aerin Leigh Lammers, Maxim Levin, Andy Zhang, and Yan Zhang) is focusing on education about household items anyone can make and use to make their lives greener.

“[One team] is involved in trying to do more DIY kinds of fixes and use alternative cleaners around the house, not the store-bought, more toxic kinds of cleaners. [They are] notifying people about how they can use things that are more common chemicals…around the house and chemicals that are less intrusive and don’t have the same kind of residues,” said science teacher Russ Barton, Eco Challenge sponsor.

The other team (Justin Camie, Jillian Day, Douglas Fritz, Alex Galindo, Abby Lammers, Claire Maher, Bryheem Mims, Ellen Wang, Alec Wood, Andy Zhang) is going national with a petition encouraging the U.S. government to require any company that could potentially introduce harmful pesticides into the environment to test the level of pesticides. The team is developing the test strip.

“We could do this on a proof of concept scale for about $10 a strip…[It would costs companies] between a penny and ten cents per strip. If that’s the case, then it seems logical that instead of the government testing themselves, it seems like it would make more sense for pesticide companies, or any company that was going to introduce possibly harmful chemicals to test themselves,” said Barton.

The winner is decided by a formula that includes how much attention each project gets. To help, anyone can like the projects’ pages on Facebook and visit the websites:  www.thePollinatorProject.org and  www.makeItGreener.org.

By Molly Thal, Editor-in-Chief