Once again, for its numerous recycling activities and more, De La Salle Collegiate’s SAVE Club (Students Against Vandalizing the Environment) earned a Michigan Green School  Emerald Award.

To qualify, the students had to describe a variety of activities they engaged in during the 2025-2026 school year. Those activities included

Clothing drive Conducted during the school’s Spirit Week,  the donated clothes were given to the St . Vincent de Paul Society, saving energy to make new clothes. Students also donated uniforms for incoming freshmen.

Motion detecting lights The school’s new STEM Center facility includes motion detecting lights that automatically turn off after a period without motion.

Ecology Class units Students learn about alternative forms of energy more sustainable than fossil fuels. The students created a board game with environmental energy facts as questions. 

Day of Service Groups of students cleaned up a cemetery, picking up garbage and cutting down invasive weeds. Some groups went to local elementary or middle schools to clean up litter and help trim bushes.

Advanced Placement Environmental Science curriculum Students learned about Michigan dams and the loss of farmland.

Eliminating SMOG A student researched methods, with other students at Rice University in July 2025, to eliminate smog and air pollution, as well as helping to prevent forest fires. The student created environmentally friendly ways the drone, called S M O K EY (Safeguarding and Minimizing the Onset of Kindling for Environmental Yield) could recharge.

Advanced Placement Environmental Science Pollinator Garden A group of AP students, working with the Teen Conservation Summit at the Detroit Zoo, planned for a pollinator garden for one of the school’s courtyards. The students funded the activity with a bottle drive.

Adopt a Platypus The SAVE Club adopted an endangered Duck-Billed Platyplus in order to support the World Wildlife Federation's global conservation efforts. 

Informational Bulletin Boards The SAVE Club maintains a bulletin boards with photos,a articles and informational guides about the environment, reminding people to recycle, and showing past Evergreen status and club events. 

Green House project AP Environmental Science students are creating and designing a house that uses principles of sustainability. 

SAVE Club Moderator Mrs. Nina Jacks said, "This student-run organization provides students the opportunity to sharpen their project planning and leadership skills through the lens of making DLS a more environmentally-friendly community. SAVE Club members not only orchestrated some of the events that earned DLS the coveted Emerald status, but they also compiled and submitted the lengthy application to Macomb County."

She added, "I look forward to impressive green efforts in the near future from our stellar group of SAVE leaders, the first in school history to be led primarily by freshmen!"