Going Green Projects for Kids

Organic Community Gardening by Teens

• Creating an organic garden in your back yard and involving schoolmates and friends lets you and your friends go green. Talk to your parents about turning a corner of your yard at home into an organic garden. "Seventeen" magazine suggests that after you get parental approval, you break ground in a small corner of your back yard, turn the soil over and plant vegetable seeds.

  To ensure your gardens are all organic, do not use chemical fertilizers. Instead, use compost to nourish the soil. After the vegetables have grown and are ready for harvesting, reserve a few vegetables for your family's use. Get together with your other gardening friends, sell the remainder of the vegetables and use the proceeds for next year's organic garden.

Growing Green

• Think about what your parents do with the grass clippings every time they mow the lawn. Instead of throwing those clippings into a trash bag, use them as natural energy.

  If your school is working on going green, starting a large compost pile is one way to begin. Those grass clippings, along with organic waste from the cafeteria, is an excellent source of biomass material. After the food scraps and grass decompose in the compost heap, the material left behind is peat moss. Use the resulting material to naturally fertilize the lawns of your school.

Recycling at Home

• Separate glass, plastic, paper and cardboard from other trash you and your family throw into the trash can. Ask your parents for another container to use for recycling, such as an empty cat litter tub. Throw items into this container and take them to a recycling center in your community periodically.

  As you recycle, ask your parents, do research and learn about why it is important to recycle. Ask them why recycling helps the Earth, writes the Chiff website.

Conserving Energy in Your Home

• You do not have to get involved in a large project that costs lots of money. Instead, look around your home and think of ways you can help the environment one step at a time.

  Ask your parents how high the water heater is set. If it is set to "hot," you will still get plenty of warm water if they change the temperature setting to "warm." Ask if your parents wash partial loads of clothing. If they do, inform them that, if they wash full loads, they will save energy and water. Itt will help their water bill, too.

  Look at all the energy vampires in your house -- these are the appliances that stay plugged in 24/7. Your refrigerator and freezer have to stay on all the time. Plug other appliances, like your TV, DVD player, game consoles, computer and printer into an energy strip. Switch the energy strip off at night and you have just helped to reduce how much energy your own household uses.

  Instead of buying incandescent light bulbs, buy the compact fluorescent lights or CFL's. They are more expensive, but they last longer and use 75 percent less energy, writes the Slash Carbon Footprints website.