Eco Dude: Greenlighting the future

This year’s winners came from Rye Country Day, Horace Greeley High School, and Yonkers Partners in Education. Parvathy Gopikrishna (center) won first place.

By DAVID POGUE 

The Trump Administration has gutted environmental laws and shut down clean-energy programs; U.S. electric car sales have dropped, and city streets no longer overflow with massive climate demonstrators. These days, you might find it tough to feel hopeful about the Earth’s fate.

Yet hope electrified the halls of the Bedford Hills Community Center on Sunday. That’s where, for the 11th year, Bedford 2030 held the finals of its Greenlight Awards, in which high-schoolers compete to present the most ingenious ideas to fix the planet. 

This year, 32 students had five minutes each to present their ideas to panels of expert judges, plus five more minutes to answer judges’ questions. It was eco-activism, “Shark Tank”–style.

In the Greenlight Awards, having an idea is not enough to win; you also have to execute it. Often, that involves conducting before-and-after surveys, running educational campaigns, measuring results — and, most infuriatingly, convincing overburdened school administrators to permit changes to the status quo. 

Tsion Halefom, for example, wanted to place a single composting bin in the cafeteria, for one lunch period a day, to see if she could convince kids to use it. But it took her Yonkers school administrators a month to grant permission — and even then, they prohibited commonly compostable stuff like pizza, meat and cheese, for fear that it might attract bugs. Halefom tied for third place anyway.

Some of the 2026 entries carried distinct entrepreneurial vibes. Emmy Liang and Natalie Zhu from the Rye Country Day School, for example, designed a set of moss panels that can be affixed to any building’s walls — the better to capture air pollution, cool overheated urban areas, reduce flooding, and muffle traffic noise. The shrewdest design detail: Their attachment system requires no permanent modifications to the buildings.

Another team from Rye Country Day, Eda Buyuk, Christopher Estill and Chase Talpins, presented their complete, closed-loop food system. They had collected food scraps from the cafeteria, dumped them into something called a “containerized anaerobic digestion system” which looks like a dumpster but converts the scraps to fertilizer much faster than traditional composting, spread the resulting fertilizer on the school’s gardens and grew vegetables that were later served in the cafeteria. Their pilot program diverted 23,000 pounds of food waste from landfills, keeping 131 tons of carbon dioxide out of the air. You’re welcome. They tied for second place.

Titan Ifedigbo used to get headaches when his mom was cooking. That experience led him to pursue a simple question: Exactly how much carbon dioxide and other bad stuff does a gas stove pump out into a kitchen? And does using an air purifier or range hood mitigate the problem? 

Using a CO2 sensor and a series of controlled experiments, he answered his own question. An air purifier alone captures only 19% of the carbon pollution from the flames. A range hood captures 60%. Combined, they remove almost all nasty gases from the air. Takeaway: At the very least, you should turn on your hood fan every time you turn on the flames. 

This year’s grand prize winner ($500) was Parvathy Gopikrishna, from Horace Greeley High School. 

She’d grown alarmed by the presence of PFAS — that is, carcinogenic “forever chemicals” — in Westchester drinking water. And no wonder: Every few years, we learn of a dangerous spike of PFAS levels in our water. 

But getting your water tested professionally costs as much as $600, and the EPA has relaxed regulations to rein in PFAS chemicals. 

What’s a citizen to do? 

For 16-year-old Gopikrishna, the answer was simple. First, she rounded up public data on the locations of local PFAS hot spots, where PFAS-laden sprays, foams, or chemical agents are dispensed: golf courses, dry-cleaning facilities, fire stations, airports, landfills, dumps, and so on.

Second, she developed an algorithm that calculates the PFAS concentration of the water for any Westchester address, taking into account proximity to hot spots, whether your building has a well or city water, and other factors.

To confirm the accuracy of her system, she compared readings from professional PFAS testing kits against her own calculations. Her prediction algorithm, it turns out, was right on target. 

The result — a beautifully designed website, waterwatch-westchester.com. Enter your home address, answer a couple of questions, and boom: There’s the PFAS risk score. If it’s over 55, get a professional test. You could be drinking some really toxic stuff.

Forever chemicals are a burning issue for both human health and planetary health; no wonder the WaterWatch Westchester project was catnip for the judges. The website cost nothing to build, and required zero supervision from school faculty. “Everything I used was available online,” Gopikrishna says. “I didn’t need any money or connections to get to it.”

Every year, Greenlight introduces new young recruits to fight for the planet’s health, supported by older ones. This year, the leadership included program manager Louise Alverson; emcee and Bedford town member Midge Iorio; and Westchester County Legislator Erika Pierce, who saw to it that each team received a certificate signed by its own county legislator. 

As a welcome bonus, La Familia Katonah donated a lot of pizza.

“This project cost me no money — just a little bit of work on my computer. If other students, or anyone else, have the same drive and same hope, we can really do anything. It’s really important to stay hopeful.” said first-place winner Gopikrishna.

David Pogue lives in Bedford Hills. He is a CBS Sunday Morning correspondent, best-selling author and board member of Bedford 2030.