Litterbugs! This Kid Is Out to Clean Up the Town

By Tim Padgett/Gainesville

Like most college towns, Gainesville, Fla., home to the University of Florida, is an eco-conscious place. But even here, motivating youngsters to police the environment can be as hard as getting them to help out with the dishes after dinner. Sometimes it takes a kid to inspire other kids to care--a kid like Will Vinson, 12, whose aluminum-can-recycling crusade lit a fire under the city's next generation. Since he was a nine-year-old fourth-grader at Littlewood Elementary School, Will has united classmates, teachers, recycling firms and other local companies in a bid to rid Gainesville's school grounds of trash and develop youth recycling programs. Says Will: "I knew that if I did it, the other kids would stand up and do it too. We don't do it if adults just lecture to us."

It wasn't so easy. Will, now a sixth-grader at Gainesville's Westwood Middle School, repeatedly called a local recycling contractor, asking the firm to donate can crushers, and a supermarket, looking for carts for can collection. Even then, his dad Tim, a chemist at UF, and his mom Betsy, who teaches at the university's speech and hearing clinic, had to tell the companies Will was serious.

Next he needed to convince other kids. He wrote entertaining spots for Littlewood's closed-circuit TV program (his slogan: "We love the 3 Rs: reduce, recycle, reuse!"), but at first many students resisted--and threw banana peels and other unsuitable garbage into his recycling bins. "One kid even got sick in one of them," Will recalls. Soon his buddies started to get the message, and the school's Girl Scout, Cub Scout and Boy Scout troops joined in, helping him recycle hundreds of pounds of cans that netted more than $100 for Littlewood's Head Start preschool program.

At Westwood, Will, a student senator, has turned much of his attention to Florida's successful youth antismoking campaign, but he's stayed close to the recycling operation he started. Whenever he travels to Atlanta to see his grandparents, who don't recycle, he bags up their cans and hauls them back to his bins and crushers in Gainesville, but not before he tries to see an Atlanta Braves game. Will is a big baseball fan, and he would just love to keep Gainesville's schoolyards as green and clean as the field his idols play on.

--By Tim Padgett/Gainesville