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Stripping My Way to a Cleaner Watershed

2016 Greeley, Colorado, USA

Dustin’s initial proposal did not make it to the final 10. However, Dustin believed he had a quality idea to improve his watershed.  He raised the money and implemented the project on his own.  He was awarded the 2015-2016 Environmental Action Award and $200.power bar

Dustin is a sophomore this year at Greeley Central High school. Dustin’s idea was built around helping to reduce the Carbon Footprint of our school by supplying every teacher’s desk a power strip mounted with Velcro. This allows teachers easy access to the switch so that they can disconnect their energy vampires every night. He purchased the power strips using grant money that the Environmental club, the Green Cats, had received from Wal-Mart for a digital energy information kiosk. He then organized a group of students who went to all 80 classrooms after school and mounted power strips inconvenient locations for the teachers.  This was followed by a school wide power down day in which we were able to see in real time how much less energy we were using through a website called PowerTakeOff. The district had set this up for a handful of schools to monitor their power usage.  Everyone was involved in this power down day from the custodial staff to the kitchen to the administration. Dustin was instrumental in making this happen. He even put together 80 bags of treats and passed them out to classrooms that were reducing their energy use!  This took a huge amount of organization and people managing skills to accomplish!  Dustin showed great maturity and leadership throughout this process.  If a school can cut down their electrical usage it can reduce the production of harmful particulates in our air and our water.