When Alicia Mathew was a kid, she started a petition to reduce plastic waste.
No one signed it. But she wasn’t easily deterred.
Years later, the Metea Valley High School junior is working to inspire greener habits in and around her community once again. This time, with the help of a local environmental group and alongside dozens of other area students who are motivated, rather than put off, by discouragement.
To show that younger generations are committed to building a sustainable future despite the notion that it’s too late to turn things around — climate doomism, for short — a cadre of about 60 students are developing their own projects and pitches of innovative solutions to address the problem.
The eco-friendly brainstorming is all for a venture called BLAST, or Building Leadership Around Sustainable Transformation. BLAST is an inaugural competition designed and launched by the youth arm of the city of Naperville’s climate advisory body, the Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force (NEST).
Ongoing for the past few months, the BLAST competition will culminate in April with a final presentation of student pitches before a group of judges. Students are competing for a small sum of prize money, but NEST organizers say the intention is really to spur ideas with the potential to grow beyond their BLAST beginnings, and hopefully stir some tangible impact.
“We want BLAST to be an opportunity for (students) to springboard into whatever comes next,” Mathew, a member of the NEST Youth Team and a BLAST entrant herself, said. “Maybe that means taking your projects to the next level or using your funding to make a real difference in the community.”
BLAST has been in the works for more than a year. It was the answer to a question that NEST co-chair Cathy Clarkin had been grappling with: how could students who are taking action on environmental issues be recognized? She took the matter to NEST’s Youth Team, and they ran with it.
The group came up with a “Shark Tank”-esque venture in which students — competing either individually or in teams — would develop sustainability projects, work with mentors to hone their ideas and ultimately pitch their concepts to a judging panel, which will select the top proposals.
“It was their decision to do this,” Clarkin said, “as opposed to anything else.”
By this school year, BLAST was ready to start recruiting its first competitors, organizers said. Some 60 students from Naperville School District 203 and Indian Prairie School District 204, as well as homeschooled students and a few from cities around Naperville, entered. Together, they represent more than a dozen group or individual projects being drawn up for the first annual BLAST.
Clarkin said projects vary from students introducing bills at the state level about climate education in schools to grassroots organizing.
Mathew’s project calls back to her younger self but utilizes more data — and education — in the fight against plastic waste. Essentially, she’s planning to first make a database of every company or organization that recycles plastic bags in the Naperville-Aurora area. Then, she’s going to invite those entities, as well as local residents, to an event promoting that there are alternatives to single-use plastics, Mathew said.
Ani Apresyan, a senior at Metea Valley, and Emma Orend, a senior at Naperville Central High School, have paired up to organize a NEST presence at Naperville’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade this Saturday. Apresyan and Orend are inviting anyone interested to march with them to advocate for a cleaner power grid in Naperville, which primarily relies on coal for its electricity.
“(We want) people … to be aware of the circumstances, to be aware of NEST,” Orend said, “to be aware of these initiatives.”
With bringing awareness, Orend, also part of NEST’s Youth Team, said she hopes BLAST counteracts “that climate doom narrative that it’s all over, that we’re well beyond the limit.”
Rather, she wants BLAST to be a testament to climate optimism.
“We have agency to still create change, whether it be local or just the plants in your bedroom or something a little bigger than that,” she said. “There’s a lot of different avenues where you can still make a difference.”
And as those avenues feed off each other, actionable change doesn’t feel so daunting, she said.
At a NEST meeting focused on sustainability in local schools last month, both Naperville school districts gave a brief overview of the actions they’re taking to make their operations more environmentally conscious.
On behalf of Naperville District 203, buildings and grounds director Melanie Brown said the district is currently working to develop a Carbon Action Plan and Greenhouse Gas Inventory for all of its operations, with the long-term goal of reducing the district’s carbon footprint.
The district put out a request for qualifications for a vendor to complete the work last year and has been weighing finalists over the past few months. Once it selects a vendor, the “real work” will begin, Brown said.
“The idea is that we will get recommendations on how to have more sustainable schools,” she said.
For Indian Prairie, Chief Business Officer Matthew Shipley pointed towards sustainability goals the district is pursuing as part of a facilities master plan it recently completed, which charts a 10-year vision for facility improvements across campuses.
That vision includes updating buildings with sustainable design, he said. For example, fashioning new roofs appropriate for solar panels, if the district wanted to pursue that project someday.
In between these long-term plans is where initiatives such as BLAST come in.
Entrant Vallabh Arun, a junior at Waubonsie Valley High School who’s been on NEST’s Youth Team for nearly three years, recognized the work that school leaders are doing but noted the impact is hard to see in real-time during the relatively short period he and his peers spend as students.
“A lot of these plans are for 5, 10, 50 years,” he said, “but we’re only in high school for four.
“I think programs like BLAST help enable us to use these four years to (make a difference) and not have to wait decades and decades of time to slowly enact change.”
