Students in the Carmel High School Sustainable Living Club created a pollinator garden for butterflies, bees, and birds in the CCS Plots to Plates Community Garden‘s meditation area. This garden, planted with perennial plants native Indiana, will increase biodiversity in our area through providing a habitat for butterflies and other pollinators and will serve to educate our community.

The University High School EcoBlazers complimented their Carmel Green Teen funded community garden created last year by creating and implementing a composting system and building a multi-purpose rain harvesting structure. The students and staff will compost school lunchroom waste for use in the community garden, and the rain barrels adjacent to the new structure will provide needed water for their teaching garden.

Girl Scout Ciara Pickering chose to educate elementary aged students about preserving the environment. Students learned about recycling and other various ways to preserve the earth through hands-on activities and crafts at Forest Dale Elementary in conjunction with the Extended School Enrichment (ESE) program.

Members of the Carmel High School Do Something Club thought that too many kids these days are not doing much to help the environment, so they created a lesson plan about the benefits of trees for the 104 first graders at Smoky Row Elementary School. Their lesson involved an interactive PowerPoint, singing, prizes, and a tree seedling for each student.

The Carmel High School TEDx Club organized and hosted a TEDx Conference that took place on April 19, 2014. This conference was based upon the official TED layout with multiple speakers talking for 18 minutes or less. A portion of these talks and videos discussed environmental sustainable living and how to implement simple practices in daily life to minimize one’s environmental impact.

The Carmel Learning Center is doing a collection of mini-projects which, when combined, make a big difference. These include recycling, reducing paper waste, replacing disposable Styrofoam cups with reusable cups, and adding potted plants to their classrooms.

Daisy Scout Troop 215 decided to help out visitors at the CHS Arts Garden with their project, planting several types of flowers that naturally repel mosquitoes so that the visitors won’t need to use bug spray. The also created a sign to educate visitors about the benefits of using natural forms of bug repellent over bug spray.

Students at Smoky Row Elementary School raised awareness about how easy and fun it can be to reduce, reuse, and recycle even unusual items with their cleverly named crayon reusing and recycling project.

The CHS Art Club added a pergola and butterfly bushes to their new ArtsGarden. The pergola will house a rotating display of recycled art and focus on encouraging over the 5000 students, faculty, and staff at CHS to consider reducing, reusing, and recycling.

Students in the Carmel Middle School Green Team student club provided the Carmel community with 1000 free native Indiana tree seedlings. They educated others, hosting a workshop on how to plant trees and demonstrating how to do so while planting three large trees on school grounds

The Carmel High School Do Something Club decided to do something environmentally friendly this year by planting four large trees at Hamilton County’s River Road Park to provide both environmental and aesthetic benefits to the people of Carmel.

Towne Meadow Elementary School students launched a crayon recycling program at their school to teach about the endless possibilities for reusing and recycling even unusual items. They also chose to purchase recycled crayons from the same factory that recycled their crayons.

Student members of Carmel High School’s Green Team tackled the issues of water and energy conservation through their projects Rain Barrel and Composting Workshops and Switch on the Savings in free community workshops held at the CCS Plots to Plates Community Garden, and in their school.

Prairie Trace Elementary students purchased tree seedlings for each student and educated the school about the importance of trees through posters and morning announcements.

The College Wood Elementary School Recycling Club promoted and facilitated mixed recycling at their school through an educational campaign and the purchase of seven large, wheeled recycle bins, increasing the school’s recycling rates by over 78%!

Woodbrook students educated their school community about the overuse of plastic bags and encouraged the recycling of plastic bags by offering 1 cent for every plastic bag recycled.

The University High School Green Club created a school community organic garden. Using a hands-on approach, students, teachers, and volunteers demonstrate organic gardening techniques and share their discoveries with the community. This is an ongoing project, with phase two of the project also funded through a Carmel Green Teen Micro-Grant

The CHS Green Shower Power club received a Carmel Green Teen micro-grant for $750 to help fund new push-on auto-off buttons and low-flow shower heads in the school and community locker rooms. The new low-flow shower heads and push buttons will be utilized by 140 Carmel High School Swim Team athletes, 440 Carmel Swim Club members, and numerous student and community recreational swimmers.

Carmel Girl Scout Troop 801 created and implemented an event called the “Bikeyard 100″ at Creekside Middle School to encourage kids to ride their bicycles safely and more often. This eco-friendly idea prevents pollution by reducing the number of cars on the road and also promotes a healthy lifestyle. At the event, over 100 kids and over 70 adults agreed to sign a pledge to ride their bikes more often to help the environment.

Boy Scout Troop 202 built and installed multiple bat boxes to encourage bats to live in several Carmel area recreational locations: Northview Church, Badger Park and Shelbourne Carmel Dads Club athletic facilities, Clay Middle School and Cool Creek Park. Bats are known to consume up to 3000 insects each night, so they are natural insect killers, reducing the need for pesticides in locations where families enjoy the outdoors.

The University High School Green Club involved the entire school in planting 34 drought resistant trees, native to Indiana on school grounds. The private nonprofit school was founded in 2000, and its buildings are surrounded by cornfields, with few mature trees in sight. They selected four 12-foot trees that would start blooming soon and 30 smaller trees that will continue to provide environmental benefits to their school and community long into the future. They paired the plantings with an educational campaign about the importance of trees in helping clean our air.

Fifth grade students from Woodbrook Elementary School created a project called Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In their school, they will reduce fuel and pollution with a No Idle Zone for cars and buses waiting in to pick up or drop off students, they will reuse shoes via a Soles4Souls collection drive, and they will encourage recycling of cans and bottles in their school cafeteria through an educational campaign which reuses existing trash bins as recycling bins.

Members of Towne Meadow Elementary’s Junior Girl Scout Troop 1120 distributed 1000 recycled, reusable shopping bags at Marsh Supermarkets and at their school. They provided educational brochures and thank you cards to all participants.

The Carmel Middle School Green Team used their grant money to educate students about the importance of recycling. They purchased ten Clear Stream recycling bins to be used in CaMS lunchrooms and at performing arts and athletic events. Launched during Earth Week 2011, education will be a large component to their project, with announcements, contests, and posters.

In March 2011, Boy Scout Troop 202 began the first monofilament fishing line recycling program in Indiana by installing and agreeing to maintain receptacles in the seven Carmel-Clay parks with fishing ponds. Recycling the fishing line is not so much about the volume of product recycled as the impact that even a small amount can have on wildlife tangled in recklessly discarded line.

The CHS Environmental Club received a Carmel Green Teen Micro-Grant for $936 to help fund long-awaited recycling bins for all three lunchrooms at CHS. The 5000 students and staff also have the opportunity to recycle throughout the school day by using funded recycling bins in the hallways.

During Earth Week the Brownies at Towne Meadow Elementary School engaged students with an educational campaign demonstrating the amount of energy consumed and waste produced by buying and using disposable water bottles.They also distributed reusable water bottles to students who promised to use and reuse them over and over again.

Members of Carmel Girl Scout troop 1166 chose to do two separate Green Teen projects. They first revamped a butterfly habitat reintroduction area at Carmel’s Carey Grove Park. A well-planned butterfly garden becomes a small, but representative sample of the surrounding habitat and as such provides a safe haven for butterflies and other wildlife to gather, seek shelter, acquire food and water, reproduce and build populations.

This organic teaching garden was created to offer students, staff, and others an opportunity to enjoy the many benefits of a community garden. MOSAICS is an alternative school that provides services to special education students identified as emotionally disabled. The project has been designed as both a therapeutic and an educational lab.

Members of Carmel Girl Scout troop 1166 then created a butterfly habitat garden at Clay Middle School eco-lab not only to introduce butterflies and bees to the area but also to provide students with a hands-on environment to study plant and animal life cycles.The Clay Middle School Outdoor Ecology Laboratory was created to promote the study of nature, natural history, ecology, and related areas. Used by Science classes and the Ecology Club, it is located on the east end of the Clay Middle School campus.

The Cherry Tree Elementary School Green Club reduced the number of disposable plastic water bottles used and disposed of in Carmel-Clay schools cafeterias by providing their school plus 3 other schools with coolers and washable cups. These will be offered to students at lunchtime so that they may drink free tap water instead of purchasing disposable water bottles.

Boy Scout Troop 180 organized over twenty members of the community to come together to plant 70 trees, indigenous to Indiana, at West Park in Carmel. Trees play key roles in habitats of all animals, including me and you. Trees also reduce carbon dioxide in the air and replace it with oxygen.

Prairie Trace Elementary Cub Scout Pack 197 promoted reusable shopping bags at their school. The Cub Scouts designed their own shopping bags. To receive a free shopping bag, each Prairie Trace Elementary family signed a pledge indicating that they would use it at least once each week for a year.

The Carmel Middle School student Green Team gave away 1000 Earth Day tree seedlings for planting. These included White oak trees, Red maple trees, and Chokeberry shrubs. The student group provided instructions on how to plant the seedlings as well as tips on keeping the trees healthy.

On December 5, 2009 34 people representing the boy scouts, church, and other groups worked together at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Carmel to build 14 – 5′x10′ and 3 – 10′x10′ raised planting beds for the St. Christopher’s Crops garden ministry. This community garden provides fresh, wholesome organic produce to area food pantries for distribution to needy families.

Through the efforts of the CHS Green Lights Club, 105 Carmel homes installed CFL bulbs in their outdoor lighting, collectively reducing their carbon footprint by 51 tons. The Green Lights Club was named a Lugar Energy Patriot for their creative work on energy conservation.

Woodbrook Elementary Webelo Scout Pack 198 seeded the River Trail pedestrian and bike path in the spring of 2010 with native Indiana wildflowers to address a need to restore plant, insect, and animal biodiversity to the areas adjacent to the multi-use pathway. The beautiful flowers now provide food and homes for birds and insects and offer beauty to the many people passing by.