Hank Klein admits he is one of those guys. You know the type.

He had a Prius hybrid in 2002, and was doing his own recycling before any cities or councils had provided separate bins.

Before stores had their own reusable bags, he was the guy coming in to the grocery store with his own cardboard boxes, so he didn’t have to use plastic bags.

“I would never throw anything away without thinking about what could be done with it,” Klein said.

The gregarious and likable teacher has been what we term an “urban conservationist” for many years now.

And though in the 1980s and ‘90s this type of behavior might have been seen as “kooky,” in 2009 it is seen as wise and responsible.

And so Klein is bringing his enthusiastic brand of conservation to the students at Challenger Elementary, where he has been a teacher for 15 years.

Klein, along with school custodian Michael Getty, was the driving force behind the establishment of a recycling program at Challenger last year which has greatly reduced the amount of rubbish being produced by the school, and increased recycling by 60 percent.

The two men recently received King County’s Earth Hero awards for their efforts to begin and conduct the program.

And a number of other schools are following their lead. Issaquah Middle School won a King County Earth Hero award for a 66 percent reduction in garbage and a 60 percent increase in recycling, which resulted in a 42 percent saving in collection costs.

Like most brilliant ideas, it is a simple one that just requires a little bit of human investment – a number of bins set up in the cafeteria.

One is for food scraps, one for cardboard and paper, like milk cartons, one is for plastics, and two are for non-recyclable rubbish.

The Challenger “Waste Watchers” program sees students helping their friends make sure their trash goes in the right bin, a role that sometimes means having to dig through the trash, with gloves on of course, to pull out stray cartons or forks and put them in the right bin.

Because of this, Klein was worried he wouldn’t get 30 or so students to volunteer that he needed to make the program work.

“But I got 163 students wanting to do it,” he said.

Klein said he got the idea from the program they were developing at Discovery Elementary School.

“We started out with milk cartons — the school was throwing out about 40,000 milk cartons every year,” said Getty. “When I started in the school district in 1991 there wasn’t any recycling at all. At the end of every lunch there would be five or six bins of rubbish. Now we produce just one.”

The food waste is picked up by Cedar Grove Composting and the recyclables are taken care of by Waste Management.

Student Nathan Tuvey was one of the pioneering Waste Watchers, and he remembers the early days, but not very fondly.

“When it first started, it wasn’t very good because it was new and the kids didn’t know where to put things,” he said. “So I was always having to pick things out of the bins and put them in other bins. But now that more people know how to use it, it’s better.”

So it seems education is the key. Klein agrees, and hopes that parents will take the next step in considering how much waste they produce by being conscious of what they buy at the grocery store.

“Hopefully instead of buying the little pre-packaged bags of snacks they will buy the larger boxes and use their own ziplock bags, which they can reuse,” he said.

City of Issaquah recycling expert, Sam Wilder, and school district conservation manager, John Macartney, this year helped establish general recycling and food waste recycling collection at several Issaquah schools.