Earth Day is the world’s largest environmental advocacy and service project and the culmination of a year-round effort to broaden, diversify and activate the environmental movement worldwide through a combination of education, public policy, and consumer campaigns.

According to Earth Day Network literature, “The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California…Senator Nelson announced the idea for a “national teach-in on the environment” to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land.”

The result? On April 22 approximately 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. And, diverse groups that had been fighting against a variety of environmental evils like oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife realized they shared common values.

Today, we at Success Won’t Wait are doing our small part through our Naked Book Recycling Program. Partnering with the Student Council members and students of H.B. duPont Middle School in Hockessin, Delaware, we continue to recycle unusable books, magazines and encyclopedias which would otherwise end up in a overcrowded landfill.

This Earth Day is no exception. We’ve delivered an additional 20 boxes of books to H.B. DuPont for recycling, bringing our total to just over 11,000 lbs. of paper recycled!!

Many thanks to Ms. Sarah Brady, the Student Council mentor and all of the dedicated students at H.B. DuPont Middle School!