Last week, the school dumped all the lunch waste on a tarp. It was "a lot," Shinn said. Nine busting bags of noon-hour trash, to be exact.

On Friday, the school asked its students to bring food in reusable containers to illustrate the results of green living.

The result?

There was a sandwich, a few plastic bags and a handful of milk cartons. Shinn had to throw away only one partially filled trash sack, eight less than last week.

"This was great," Shinn said. "These kids got so into it. You had some telling others, 'That's not trash.' "

For 12-year-old Luke Miltz, Friday's events were a no-brainer.

"If you can recycle, and it's so easy," he said pointing to a recycling bin feet away, "then you just should."

Luke is part of the school's Green Team, which is attempting to integrate a more environmentally friendly attitude into the school. He and fellow 12-year-old Natalie Shinn, the science teacher's daughter, go through the recycling bins and sort out the bottles and cans.

"It's a little bit hard sometimes when they treat it like a trash can," Luke said of the plastic-bottle bin.

He said more and more kids at school have taken an interest in living a green life. Many donned green T-shirts as they waited Friday afternoon for the few items to be dropped on the tarp.

Natalie said she agreed with Luke about green living catching on at Collegiate. She said last year's "An Inconvenient Truth" helped "open a lot of eyes" to what she said was a real problem.

"I think this year people are catching on even more, and they're starting to pay attention," she said.

James Carlson can be reached at (785) 295-1186 or james.carlson@cjonline.com.