Celeste Tinajero: Environmental Teen Activist

Celeste Tinajero in an environmental teen activist. She believes that everyone should get involved and help the environment. “I want them to know and be on the side of environmentalism,’’ Celeste says in an interview. Celeste is part of an organization called ACE which stands for Alliance for Climate Education. She has even created her own campaign called Ban the Bag to get rid of plastic bags in her community. The organization also helps others to know why plastic bags are so bad for the community. Since Celeste’s school was so old and not ecologically friendly, she was even able to make the school more “green” and eco-friendly.

ACE

The organization Celeste is part of is called ACE (Alliance for Climate Education). ACE goes to high schools

and they teach the students about climate change and they empower teens to lead on climate solutions. ACE teaches high schoolers about the knowledge and skills of climate change so they can become confident climate leaders.

A lot of high school students take part in ACE. They recruit between 50-100 school students each year and those students are then known as ACE Fellows or just fellows. Fellows meet weekly and they work with ACE and other partners to raise public support for climate action. They stand up for local climate problems and make people more aware of the climate change. They find solutions through speaking at events, they get petition signatures, they meet with elected officials, and they tell their peers and community members about their cause for climate change. Being a part of ACE has many benefits to the high school students. Fellows receive a $100 allowance per semester as well as receiving recommendation letters for colleges, building knowledge about climate science and solutions,

developing communication skills in public, getting community service hours, and much more. There are many current ACE projects now. For example in Chicago, Illinois, fellows are campaigning for legislation that will make the outdated Renewable Portfolio Standard law better and they are increasing the access to renewable energy for low-income communities. Up north, the fellows in New York are trying to put up a law that makes all public schools in New York teach about climate change. In Boston, fellows are working toward making Massachusetts the first state to deprive state pensions of fossil fuels. ACE is helping the climate all over the country!

Ban the Bag

Celeste’s community, Reno, had many plastic bags floating around in the city and in their Truckee River. That is why Celeste created the Ban the Bag project which is against plastic bags. Plastic bags are floating everywhere in Reno and in empty lots. She spreads the word about plastic bags to people and she tells them what they can do to help. A group of supporters is already helping Celeste and together they have formed a city-wide plastic bag ban which has made a major impact in Reno. Another environmental organization in Reno called Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful or KTMB liked Celeste’s campaign so much that they offered her a job running the campaign with them. She applied and did get the job. Thanks to Celeste and her amazing idea, Reno is mostly plastic bag free.

Why Plastic Bags so Bad for the Environment

Although not many people might know it, plastic bags are very bad for the environment. Plastic bags are made from crude oil which is a non-renewable resource which is running out. Sixty to one hundred million barrels of oil are needed to make a year’s worth of plastic bags. Oil is something we need for other things such as cars so why should we be using it for plastic bags when plastic bags can be replaced by reusable bags? Not only are making plastic bags using up natural resources, but it is also creating pollution. For example, 50 million garbage bags end up as litter yearly in Australia. Plastic bags are not biodegradable which means it’s not able to decay through the action of bacteria so it takes long to get rid of. It takes approximately 400 years for a bag to biodegrade. All that plastic bags are doing is taking up space. Along with pollution, plastic bags are also hurting our oceans and the plants and animals in them. The “plastic soup” patch or the patch of plastic bags floating on top of the Pacific Ocean, is twice the size of the continental United States. That is a lot of plastic bags! Sadly, 100,000 sea turtles and other marine animals die each year because they mistake the bags for food or they get strangled in them. All these bad things happen with plastic bags because there are so many; between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags being used each year worldwide as of 2010.

Celeste’s ‘Green’ School

Celeste went to a high school called Reed High School in Reno, Nevada.

Her school was old and not ecologically friendly. She couldn’t bare to see her school like that. So she decided to do something about the problem. Celeste’s older brother , Hector, was one of the founders of the Eco Warriors. She went to support her brother one day then stayed because she loved it. The Eco Warriors was a green club at Celeste's school. They go out and try to make their school and community more ecologically friendly or as they like to call it ‘green’. They are even considered a role model for other green clubs in Washoe County School District because the club was recognized as the most active club at her high school. One of the main problems the school had was the bathrooms. The bathrooms had outdated toilets and faucets that leaked water everyday. To stop this problem, the Eco Warriors applied for a grant at GREENavada. In 2011, they received the $12,000 grant. With this money added new technology to their bathrooms. The dual flush toilets reduced the amount of gallons of water wasted per flush. From 6 gallons to only 1 gallon. The censored sinks they put in save water because there wouldn’t be people forgetting to turn the sinks off and the sink wouldn’t drip like the ‘knob’ facets did. The new automatic lights saved the energy wasted from the morning till 10 pm. They also added air hand dryers to save paper from being wasted. All these new renovations saved paper, water, money, and

energy. Celeste was so motivated when she got the grant, that she decided to work on another issue. Single-use plastic bottles. She believed that using single-use plastic water bottles was bad for the environment because it used a lot of plastic for just one time. Her school got another grant of $3500 dollars to install ‘hydration stations’ where students could refill their bottles instead of getting another plastic bottle. But it wasn’t easy to get these machines in. Since her school was so old, it had asbestos in the wall. Before putting in the hydration stations in, the asbestos had to be removed. Celeste and other peers raised money by selling reusable water bottles at her school’s Feedstock Festival. After all the work was done and the hydration stations were put in, students started to use the stations and an estimated 37,000 water bottles were saved. In her senior and junior years, she was the president of the Eco Warriors. Today all these new renovations are still saving the environment.

Celeste Tinajero

Celeste is now 22 years old. In 2013 she graduated from Reed. After she graduated she went to Truckee Meadows Community College and there she studied environmental science. She is so hardworking because while she was in college she educated kids at schools about renewable resources as a member of GREENavada and of Black Rock Solar. Another job she had was as an AmeriCorps Vista volunteer with KTMB where she teaches on water and waste conservation. Since she is such a good leader, she won the 2015 Brower Youth Award given by the Earth Island Institute New Leader Initiative for her very good efforts to promote ecological sustainability and social justice. In 2015 she has worked with ACE for 5 years. Even though Celeste is no longer in her school’s Eco Warriors club, she still helps in Reno by making curriculum on suitable living in her local schools.

Celeste a very strong teen activist that other people can look up to. She’s done many things in her community to make it more ecologically friendly. Because of her, other people know why plastic bags and other items were bad for the environment. At her school, she made a major impact that will hopefully last forever. In 2017, Celeste celebrated being part of ACE for 7 years. You can do amazing things to help the environment too. You could join or create an environment club at your school and start from there. Or you could speak at community events about the environment and its problems. All you have to do is start and go from there. Everyone is capable of making a change no matter their age.