New climate projects around school

Recently, many climate projects have been implemented to better improve the school environment, including the tri-bins, bamboo utensils and electric charging in the parking lot.

“Everyone leaves trash everywhere, [which is] making the seagulls come,” said sophomore Haley Lau. “[The seagulls start] eating food that’s not for them, it leaves the campus a really big mess after lunch and then the staff has to clean it up [which is] a lot of extra work for them … People [littering] food [is also] really disrespectful to the people making the food [and] wasteful.”

There are now new additions of tri-bins on campus for the purpose of encouraging students to properly sort their trash. The tri-bins have three different colors: blue, black and green with symbols that represent recycling, trash and compost, respectively.

Further, during the November sustainability week, plastic utensils were changed to bamboo utensils; the same change will be made in April for Earth Week.

“I prefer [bamboo utensils] better than plastic ones, but the only downgrade is that you get a woody taste when you bite into your food,” said freshman Sofia Cabrera. “Other than that, they’re perfectly fine … [and] they are a really good alternative for plastic.”

Currently, there have only been small changes, but in the future, there will be more and larger projects.

“[One] initiative is to put in newer, more efficient solar panels at Aragon,” said Greg Moretti, Advanced Placement Environmental Science teacher and Aragon’s representative on the district’s sustainability committee. “They’ll cover the entire student parking lot with solar panels [and] we’ll have at least three Electric Vehicle charging stations installed either this semester or over the summer … eventually we’ll have 12 EV charging parking spots on campus … to make it easier for people to use electric vehicles.”

Clubs like One World Club also contributed to these causes.

“I was motivated in seventh grade by Greta Thunberg and it opened my eyes to climate change” said senior Julia Del Mundo. “Lots of people are uneducated about it and don’t know how to solve it, or think they have to make a huge impact. But small things can add up to one big impact if we all come together … The [club] name in itself is [how] we have this one world that we need to save together.”

Many other Aragon students were also involved in building these environmental projects, requiring many negotiations and preparations to successfully conduct them.

“It took a lot of effort to instate even just small initiatives for green sustainability projects,” said senior Matthew Lau. “Especially when I went to the board to present my group’s initiative, the main concern was the financial impact of instating compostable or biodegradable foodware. We weren’t able to fully instate that, but we were able to do small actions that were sustainable, but also feasible. We’ve implemented the condiment dispensers where you pump the ketchup, mustard and ranch to mitigate the usage of plastic condiment wrappers.”

As climate crises become more prevalent, there will be more projects implemented in hopes of addressing these issues launching in the new 2025-2026 school year.