AUBURN – One teacher, five seniors and a handful of freshmen have changed the way Edward Little High School disposes of paper.

The EL Recycling Club, organized by physics teacher Pete Worthington, convinced teachers to place recycling bins in their classrooms.

That was last fall. Now the club is collecting and recycling two tons of paper each month.

“When I came here and saw it wasn’t being done, I was on a mission,” said Worthington, who last year taught at Bonny Eagle High School in Standish.

At EL, he began his physics classes teaching about the waste stream that ends up in landfills. He demonstrated how landfills are expensive ways to get rid of trash. A few of his students caught the recycling bug. The club was born.

Now, freshmen roam the school collecting and dumping paper into bins. Every other week, Worthington drives a truck to the solid waste facility in Lewiston.

“We didn’t realize how much stuff was going into the trash until you sit here and look down the hall,” said senior Angelina Giorgetti, 18. “All these boxes are overflowing with paper. Before this year it was all thrown in the trash.”

The club had to overcome obstacles, such as figuring out how to move tons of paper to Lewiston, since Auburn doesn’t pick up school recyclables.

Public works crews collect curbside recycling for households, but the service is not set up to pick up larger loads at schools, said Public Works Assistant Director Sid Hazelton. “It comes down to economics,” he said.

EL’s club leaders are seniors Giorgetti, Tonya Cole, Rory Chisholm-Drane, Cam Leary and Cam McGary.

Earlier in the year Giorgetti and Chisholm-Drane spent hours organizing, including making and decorating dozens of recycling boxes for classrooms.

Taking a cue from how teachers motivate students with gold stars, they came up with a contest for teachers.

“We started doing a recycler of the week,” said Giorgetti. The class that generated the most material to be recycled was the winner.

“I started making these posters for teachers,” Giorgetti said. “I’d hang it on their door, so when they got to school they saw they were the recycler of the week.”

Some teachers got competitive, vying to win. That boosted participation.

Worthington, 48, credits his mother for teaching him to recycle “and think about where we’re throwing trash.” His mother, an avid recycler who lives in Bridgton, goes to elementary schools and talks about recycling and landfill use.

Club members say recycling is an important step everyone can take to help the environment and save money.

“Our generation is the next generation to take over the Earth,” said Chisholm-Drane. It bothers her, she said, to see materials going to waste when they could be recycled.

Too many people don’t recycle “because they think it’s more work, and other people will take care of it later on,” Chisholm-Drane said.