PINE BEACH — Officials and residents here say they have 18-year-old Lindsey Van Zile to thank for launching the campaign that led to the borough’s first $2,000 grant from Sustainable New Jersey and a new native garden at Pocket Park. “I was tired of looking at the overgrown weeds, and seeing how bad the area looked when I was riding my bike,” said the teen, who lives near the park at the corner of Riverside and Motor roads. Last year, Van Zile began going to Borough Council meetings to persuade council members to help with her quest to revitalize the park. The council agreed to pass a resolution to apply for the grant. “She (Van Zile) walks her talk,” Councilwoman Susan Coletti said of Van Zile. “She is the one who wrote the grant, and executed her plan.” “I just wanted people to be able to come here and enjoy nature, its beauty,” Van Zile said. In addition to the council’s help, Van Zile also sought the help of the American Littoral Society and its Bayscape for Barnegat Bay program. “The program was created for just that purpose, to help individuals with preserving and protecting the bay area,” said Helen Henderson, Atlantic Coast programs manager and Barnegat Bay projects director. “Anyone can participate in the programs and create native plant gardens and become stewards of the land,” she said. Van Zile said her parents, Marcy and Robert Van Zile, have always been environmentally conscious. Her father works for a pharmaceutical company and her mother is a Clean Ocean Action volunteer. “I guess I get my drive to preserve and recycle from my parents,” she said. “It must have rubbed off on me.” The work to create the garden included clearing the land of debris and tilling the land. Van Zile purchased the plants including blazing stars, foxglove and bush blueberry plants. The area is lined with stone pavers and has a tiled stone that was designed for the garden by Van Zile’s neighbor, 9-year-old Taylor McCue. Van Zile recently graduated from Toms River High School South. She has received multiple awards for her volunteer work, and also started a recycling program in the town. Through the program, she collects empty yogurt cups and granola wrappers to send to Terracycle, a Trenton company that recycles the materials into new products. “They pay me money for the recyclables. So far, I have $500 coming to me,” she said. The windfall will go to the environment, of course, says Van Zile, who heads to Lynchburg College in Virginia in August and plans to become an environmental lawyer: She expects to buy garden enhancements, such as signage to identify its plants.

One group of students worked with Sarah Vorreiter, a resident assistant in Lincoln Avenue Residence Hall on a floor designated as a Sustainable Living and Learning Community whose students tend to care more about environmental issues. Vorreiter had already initiated a recycling program with TerraCycle, an organization that collects trash and transforms it into sellable products, but participation had been low to nonexistent. She wanted the group from Kuo's class to help her expand the program and encourage more students to participate by recycling the specific kinds of trash that the company accepts. "We saw that there was no pre-existing advertising or other visible prompts to encourage students to participate," said Nick Musso, one of the students in the group. In order to solve the problem, the team of students decorated the large receptacles in the common trash collection room. But they found that one of the biggest obstacles to recycling was that the students were reluctant to take their trash down the hall to that special receptacle. "We were able to get boxes free from the Lincoln Avenue Residence dining hall," Musso said. "We stapled a flyer about the program to the boxes and delivered one to each room on the floor. Having a box right in their room made it more convenient for them to participate." The group also put flyers and collection bins in the women's shower areas, making it convenient for them to recycle empty shampoo and other beauty care product containers. "The students did a good job of thinking through where and how the residents use the products," Kuo said. "Putting the recycling bins in locations that are convenient made it easy for people to participate." The team also generated enthusiasm for the program with a pseudo competition. They set goals for the number of chip bags, dairy and beauty product containers, and candy wrappers the floor would collect in a three-week period of time and displayed colorful posters in the dorm to track the progress. The program resulted in 42 times more recycling of chip bags and 36 times more beauty care products than was recorded by Vorreiter from the months before.

Tom Szaky collects the most disgusting things. Yucky yogurt containers. Sticky candy wrappers. Old flip-flops. Now, he and his Trenton, N.J., company, TerraCycle, are onto a new one: cigarette butts, the most common litter items on the planet. So bring ‘em on. Let neither stinkiness nor sogginess nor other manner of nastiness be a barrier. Once in hand, the company will “sanitize” and sort the butts, sending the paper and tobacco to a specialty tobacco composter. The filters will be melted and re-formed into pellets, eventually to end up as two different but butt-worthy items — ashtrays and park benches. For every 1,000 butts sent in by a TerraCycle member (find out more atwww.terracycle.com), a dollar will go to the national anti-littering nonprofit, Keep America Beautiful. Szaky said the new butt program “will help to promote our belief that everything can and should be recycled.” It’s part of his plan to “eliminate the idea of waste.” Targeting butts should be easy. They’re everywhere. A 2009 Keep America Beautiful study found that 65 percent of cigarette butts wind up as litter. In a quarter-century of beach cleanups, volunteers for the Ocean Conservancy have picked up more than 52 million butts — the most pervasive item they find. Many beaches now limit smoking to designated areas. Campuses fed up with spending thousands of dollars picking up the things have considered bans. Still the butts come. They are more than unsightly. Peer-reviewed studies have detailed how metals leach from smoked cigarettes. And how chemicals in the butts are harmful to fish, which is relevant because many butts wind up in waterways. Even when butts are picked up — or not littered to begin with — they add to the waste stream piling up in our landfills. Keep America Beautiful has actually studied butt locales. Most (85 percent) wind up on the open ground, followed by bushes or shrubbery, then around — not in — trash receptacles. The final 15 percent get stubbed out in planters.

While eating lunch with her children at school, Tracy Romzek was shocked to see how much of the meal was thrown out. Not just the food, but the things that could be recycled, like milk cartons. Romzek, 38, a Town of Menasha mother of two who has a master’s degree in environmental engineering, decided to research the best way to recycle the materials. Then, she talked to the school principal and school district officials. “I just saw something that could be done and chose to take action,” she said. Romzek admitted she didn’t know what it would take to get a milk carton recycling program started. But once she took action at Clayton, it opened the door to other recycling possibilities and, ultimately, other schools in the district. “It started as a carton thing but what it really turned out to be was cafeteria recycling,” she said, noting the program is currently implemented in all but one of Neenah’s elementary schools and at Horace Mann Middle School. She hopes to bring the program to Jefferson Elementary and Fox River Academy in Appleton. She signed up for recycling brigades with TerraCycle, a free waste collection program for hard-to-recycle materials. Clayton now collects dairy containers like yogurt tubs, drink pouches, Scotch tape dispensers, paper products, Solo cups, granola bar wrappers, cheese packaging and Lunchables containers, among other items. “That is waste being upcycled,” she said. “These are things that are not traditionally recycled.” Romzek also was awarded an environmental education grant from SCA Tissue, which allowed her to purchase containers and things needed for the recycling programs. She hopes to encourage the schools to get away from bagging the recyclables. The milk cartons, she noted, cannot be tied up in a plastic bag or they will rot. She also sought a local facility, Fox River Fiber in DePere, to take away the materials. “It’s pretty cool we have a local company that wants them,” she said. She sees recycling as a cost-saving measure for the district. “A third of the lunchroom waste is going into recycle rather than the garbage,” she said. “Recycling is cheaper to pick up than the garbage.”   Andrew Thorson, director of facilities and an engineer in the district, said he appreciates all Romzek has done.   “She’s very dedicated and she has a lot of energy to handle these things,” he said. “It’s very helpful to us that she can spend her time on that. We have the need but not necessarily the ability to do as much as she does.” Romzek also thinks the recycling programs educate the children. “A lot of these kids, once I showed them what can be recycled, they love it and they really try and they want to do the right thing,” she said, noting that by getting them “involved early on, they will care later.”