Classmates for Climate Change

November 28, 2019
Inside Sacramento December 2019
insidesacramento.com/inside-sacramento-december-2019
By Jessica Laskey
December 2019

Two high school seniors at Sacramento Waldorf School are making the world better—one carbon footprint at a time. Tyler Cochran-Branson and Riley Day recently launched a composting effort at their school as part of a bigger initiative to invigorate the school’s climate-change awareness and minimize its carbon footprint.

“We, like everyone else our age, are bombarded with article after article about the climate crisis,” Cochran-Branson says. “It was honestly very depressing. We weren’t sure what to do, but we knew we had to do something. So we brainstormed and came up with a month-to-month plan.”

Since September, the dynamic duo has been showing videos to classmates during lunchtime to get students talking about the climate crisis. They then implemented a high school-wide composting system to reduce food waste. But they are not stopping there.

Tackling fast fashion—clothing made by retailers using environmentally unfriendly practices, as well as sweatshop labor—is next on their list, with a plan to involve the school in a huge clothing exchange.

“Our goal for this project is to bring awareness to the students and hope that they will bring their knowledge to their families and make a change in their household.”

Check your own carbon footprint at footprintcalculator.org.

Jessica Laskey can be reached at jessrlaskey@gmail.com. Submissions are due six weeks prior to
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