Congrats to the Houghton Middle School Eco Challenge team! Their "Land and Water" Project for the Lexus Scholastic Eco Challenge has advanced to the final (NATIONAL) round of the competition! Only 7 other middle school teams in the country will proceed to this last round!

This team made use of NECi's testing kits to measure Nitrate, and published a special thank you:

"NECi sponsored us and sent us over tools to measure nitrate concentration. We wouldn't have been able to proceed with our experiments without their help. Special thanks to Ellen R. Campbell, the CEO of NECi, for helping out with our project."

Following information has been taken from their website, which you can view in full HERE.

Who We Are

We are the HMS Backyard Backlash Lexus Eco Challenge team from HMS (Houghton Middle School). Our team consists of ten eighth grade students who are interested in helping to raise awareness regarding what people in our community can do in their own backyards to help protect the local environment.  Houghton, Michigan is located in the Keweenaw Peninsula, a very rural area along the southern border of Lake Superior.

The Lexus Scholastic Eco Challenge is a national competition for both middle and high school student teams. There are two categories: Air & Climate and Land & Water.  To enter the competition, student teams must identify an environmental issue in their community, gather background information, and come up with an action plan to address the issue as well as educate the community. In the fall of 2017 our team entered projects in both categories. Our "Air & Climate" project involved learning about the negative impacts of backyard burning and how to reduce this impact.  Our "Land and Water" project aimed at finding ways to reduce the impact of nitrates on soil and water quality.

In December of 2017, we learned that our "Land and Water" project had advanced to the final round of competition!  This achievement was shared by only seven other middle school teams in the nation.  With the recognition came $10,000 in funds for our team and school, and an invitation to continue our work.

Goals

Our goals include educating ourselves about these topics, and then in turn spreading awareness in the community as well as proposing solutions to these local environmental issues.  We hope to produce viable results from our outreach and  experimentation that will be useful to others and positively impact our local environment.