According to DoSomething.org, Americans generate more than 200 million tons of garbage each year, enough to fill a large baseball stadium from top to bottom twice a day. With Earth Day right behind us, now is the perfect time to think about our impact on the environment, and how we can better respect and help the planet that provides us with the oxygen and food we need in order to live.

Many other countries around the world, including Germany, are already taking huge steps to do this.

“Germans are highly sensitive to environmental issues and demonstrate their awareness of the environment on a daily basis,” German Honor Society advisor Sviatlana Khalpukova said. “They have endless categories for waste management, therefore, recycling is a fairly complicated skill in Germany. For example, there are three containers for various kinds of glass alone.”

Last Thursday, 20 student members of the German Honor Society participated in a Raider Boulevard Clean-Up after school in order to improve the condition of the school grounds by ridding it of various garbage and debris.

“Every year since sophomore year, we’ve learned about ‘umweltschutz’ which means environmental protection in German,” GHS vice president Alana Staskiewicz said. “This year, the GHS cabinet decided to be more active than it has been in the past few years, and use our knowledge on this topic to help out out community.”

The event was primarily organized by the society’s treasurer, Jeff Cowen. Cowen is a member of the Sustainable Hillsborough Committee which, according to the Hillsborough Township website, is “the most recent step in Hillsborough’s long-range effort to maintain and enhance its quality of life” and works to “promote sustainable development and environmental stewardship by adopting a long-term, strategic planning process.”

The committee is headed by chairman Dr. Chris Obropta who provided GHS students with garbage bags, gloves, trash grabbers, and neon orange vests. The students, all members of GHS, spent an hour of their afternoon picking up various articles of trash found on school grounds.

“Overall, it was a lot more successful than I initially thought it would be,” Staskiewicz said. “We had about ten trash bags, and it was cool to take what we have learned in the classroom and apply it out of the classroom.”

“Picking up all this garbage really puts things in perspective,” senior Mihir Gokhale said.

When it comes to helping the environment, every little bit counts. It does not take much effort to recycle a can instead of throwing it in the trash, or on the ground, use a reusable water bottle instead of a plastic one, or give your old clothes to charities instead of throwing them away, but doing these things help the environment immensely.

“We’re saving Hillsborough one wrapper at a time,” Cowen said.