We live in a beautiful environment: trees line every road, a flourishing state park is only a few miles away, and most of our back yards are at least partially forested. With such treasures to call our own, we have a duty to protect nature, and a group of students at Orange High School has started a school recycling program to clean up the school and protect the environment at the same time.

Before we started the program, our school garbage pails overflowed with plastic bottles and aluminum cans sold in our lunch lines and vending machines. While blue bins in every classroom collected waste paper, other recyclable materials were completely going to waste.

"We saw that our school had much more potential and felt that we needed to intervene," says senior Alison Hamilton.

The "Recycling Team" met with the school principal, who connected us with our school's recycling coordinator, Patricia Biek. Ms. Biek's classes were the only thread holding together any recycling program at all, emptying the few classroom bins that we had every few weeks as part of community service.

Our team agreed to ask companies to donate additional recycling bins. The only ones that we had were from a program that had fallen apart several years earlier, and there were far too few to cover the entire school. We also planned to redistribute the pails and designate them for plastics and aluminum.

At first, our goals seemed as though they could be accomplished in a matter of days. The Coca-Cola and Pepsi companies, whose products are sold by our school, agreed to send us some large blue and white barrels that were once used for syrup and could now be turned into pails.

Hillsborough Mayor Tom Stevens put us in touch with the school board. We also already had Dumpsters remaining from the last program that could be used to hold the new materials once the program got off the ground.

However, our team soon found out that the project was going to take a great deal of perseverance and dedication to accomplish. Our promised donations were not coming in, and the school board did not have the money to buy us more bins. We had almost hit a dead-end.

We decided to make do with the bins that we had. Meeting two mornings before school every week, we worked on tallying and collecting the school's green bins, which were either full of garbage or gathering dust in corners. We stored them in a back room of the school, and continued meeting to arrange our publicity plan before setting the bins back out.

"Taken alone, it wouldn't be a pleasant job, but the fact that we were doing something that we knew would make a difference both at our school and beyond made it enjoyable and rewarding," says senior Lindsi Gibson.

"It has been a great experience," adds junior Andrew Byrd. "It is a unique chance to be able to learn outside of a classroom how to take action for something we care about, and we're all having fun at the same time."

The project has been a mix of teamwork, dedication to a cause, and quite simply fun. On Feb. 22 our team spent the night making tie-dye shirts, splattering our clothing with as much vibrant paint as we could find and finishing it off with loudly painted declarations of "Orange goes Green!" By wearing them around school, we raise awareness for our cause and encourage our classmates to commit to it as well.

"We all had a good time, got to know each other better, and built up as a team," says senior Robby Dow.

Now, our team is at the point of redistributing the pails, pails with a renewed purpose. We also plan to expand our efforts by helping other schools in the county to do the same. It is incredible gaining knowledge in a classroom alone, but being able to stand up on one's own two feet and learn how to make a difference is another wonderful experience entirely.