Last summer, Mountain View teen Akshat Mehrotra started spending his weekends campaigning outside local farmers markets to raise awareness about the impacts of plastic pollution. But the 17-year-old’s passion for the environment has been with him his whole life, thanks to his parents.

“They’ve always been extremely environmentally conscious, and they always make decisions that make the least carbon footprint,” Mehrotra said. “They really promote this sort of sustainable lifestyle.”

Mehrotra, like many young people today, said he deals with climate anxiety, a term coined in recent years for the distress people increasingly are feeling around the impacts of climate change. A 2021 survey of 10,000 young people ages 16 to 25 found that more than 60% feel sad, afraid and anxious about the climate crisis.

“To be honest, I’ve been pretty depressed about the state of the world,” said Mehrotra, a junior at The Harker School in San Jose. “It sounds pretty cliche, but whenever I turn on the news I just hear something about extreme weather or plastic pollution in the ocean – something that doesn’t really make me excited about the future.”

Last year, Mehrotra decided he wanted to channel that concern into action. He started bringing signs with him to the Mountain View Farmers Market on Sundays to teach market-goers about the harms of single-use plastic. He used his birthday money to buy cloth produce bags, and gave them away for free to encourage people to ditch the disposables. He’s dubbed his campaign Sustainable Sundays.

“I wanted to create an impactful change at a grassroots level, doing my own bit to help the crisis,” Mehrotra said. “I realize that Sustainable Sundays probably won’t have a global impact, but I think I’d be happy even if I made a small impact in my own community.”

As he spoke with people about why they weren’t using reusable bags at the farmers market, Mehrotra learned that many folks in the community said they wanted to but accidentally forget them at home.

So Mehrotra decided to spend his winter break developing an Android app that reminds people to bring their reusable bags to the farmers market. Users can select their local market, and based on what time the market begins and the user’s proximity to the market, the app will send a first reminder when the user is within 5 miles of the market and a second reminder when they’re within 0.1 miles. The app is currently available on the Google Play store.

“I’ve been taking AP Computer Science at school,” Mehrotra said. “I wanted to use the skills that I learned in CS class in the real world, and I decided, what better way than to make an app?”

So far, Mehrotra said, he’s had a few downloads. He’s hoping to hand out flyers promoting the app at future farmers markets. He also plans to expand his Sustainable Sundays campaign beyond Mountain View in the future.

“I’ve been to Palo Alto’s farmers market, but I’m also planning to go to other farmers markets as well: Sunnyvale, maybe even Menlo Park,” he said.

His ultimate goal is for South Bay farmers markets to follow in the footsteps of Berkeley’s farmers markets, which banned all single-use plastic produce bags and packaging in 2009, the first farmers market in the nation to do so.

“I think Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, these are all great farmers markets that could easily make the shift,” Mehrotra said. “No plastic produce bags is quite a lofty goal, but even if we end up reducing the consumption of those bags, say by 50%, I think that’s still a big win in my book.”