Author Archives: Chloe Sprecker

B.E.L.U (Bicicleta Energía Limpia Universal – Bicycle Universal Clean Energy)

2016, San Antonio de Areco, Buenos Aires, Argentina

– EES Técnica N1 “Jorge Alfredo Maciel”- San Andres de Giles. Students: Pablo Díaz, Mario Miguel Martínez, Juan Gastón Guerrieri, Ignacio Menchaca.

– The B.E.L.U. Project proposes the construction of a prototype designed to transform mechanical energy into electricity.

The aim of this project is to contribute with the environment, raising awareness in the community about clean and healthy energy. It also shows how we combine healthy exercise with concern about energy resources.

Plastic is Drastic – Soft Plastic Collection

2016, WARRNAMBOOL, VIC, Australia

In 2016 Warrnambool Special Development School (WSDS) students Destiny, Zander, Caleb and Caleb placed in the final competition for their proposal Plastic is Drastic. They saw that they could make a bigger difference in the recycling of plastics at their school by putting strategies in place to dispose of ALL plastics in a sustainable way.

In Australia we use around 5 billion plastic bags each year. 150 million of these in up littering our environment harming our waterways and our wildlife (Clean-up Australia Day).

WSDS has always recycled hard plastic, such as plastic bottles and yogurt containers but soft plastics always went to land fill, such as plastic wrap and plastic bags. The students did some research and found there was a local business that collects these ‘soft plastics’ for recycling and re-use.

As a result the school has put the following policies in place indefinitely to help reduce plastic going to landfills and into the environment:

Educating students and teachers in the school about the damage that plastic can cause when dumped into landfill polluting not only our water catchment but our oceans too.
Continue to discourage the use of plastic through regular rubbish free lunch days, promoting the use of re-useable plastic containers in lunchboxes and promote rubbish free foods, clearly labeled bins in each classroom and the introduction of the ‘Recycled Scarecrow’ competition.
Implement a soft plastic collection throughout WSDS via 3 central locations around the school where each class can take their soft plastic at the end of each week. While at the end of each term the bags of soft plastic are collected from each location and taken to a local collection centre where they are compressed and then taken to another location for recycling and re use.
Encourage and advise families in our school to minimize the use of plastic in the home and how to dispose of it in a sustainable way when they do have it via our school newsletter.
Inform the wider community that ‘Plastic is Drastic’ through ‘Kids Teaching Kids’ days in Warrnambool, so far taking our message to 6 other schools in our catchment. We conduct two workshops called ‘Plastic is Drastic’ watching an iMovie about why plastic is drastic and making ‘recycled scarecrows’ using plastic we collect that would go to landfill otherwise.

The students believe these are really easy strategies to implement in any school and encourage all schools to follow suit.

Food Wastage

2016, KANIVA, VIC, Australia

Remmi and Tavie from Kaniva College placed in the top 10 of all the entries submitted in the Australian competition of Caring for our Watersheds with their proposal about wasting food. They wanted to reduce organic food going to landfill and thought the best way to so in their community would be through education.

Remmi and Tavie discovered that amazingly, the average Australian household wastes up to 345kg of food a year, most of this ending up in landfill. At the same time, when organic food rots in landfill it creates methane, a harmful gas to us and the environment.

They figured if they reached out to their local community via their school classrooms they could directly influence 250 households with the potential to reduce 86,250kg of food going to landfill. This is a huge number and this is just our small community; the project could definitely grow bigger and go into other parts of our catchment.

The idea was to create a fun comic to teach people the facts about wasting food, through the costs both economically and to the environment. This comic was linked into the cooking classes at the school. These were specialized classes teaching students how they can save food from going to landfill by giving them ideas about how to use left overs and create shopping lists so less food goes to waste. Sending this comic home with them after the class ensures the message gets taken home to their families.

Eco-Friendly Dry Erase Markers

international_dry-erase-markers In researching her Caring for our Watersheds project, Katelyn discovered a starting fact about her school’s use of dry erase whiteboard markers; “My school goes through approximately 1570 markers within a 10 month period.” That’s 1570 markers going in the trash each year. Given that these markers “are plastic, toxic, and non-recyclable” Katelyn saw the need to make a change to “prevent and lower the amount of chemicals making their way into the Lake Winnipeg watershed.”

#KanivaWater

2016, KANIVA, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

In 2014 Kaniva College students Louise, Jaden, Duncan and Luke took first place in the final competition for their proposal #KanivaWater. Since then, Louise and Jaden have been working tirelessly to put their idea into action. Their idea consists of providing their town with free, fresh drinking water to reduce the amount of plastic bottles purchased by the local community and visitors.

Kaniva is known as a highway town. Located on route between Melbourne and Adelaide, thousands
of people pass through Kaniva each day using this small country town as a rest stop. The students saw this as an opportunity to help the community and visitors reduce their impact on the environment by helping them to reduce or even stop buying plastic bottles.

Bottling water produces 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, and it takes 3L of water to produce just 1L of bottled water. Additionally, 2015 figures showed over 40% of litter picked up throughout clean up Australia Day was plastic.

Until now Kaniva had no free potable water in town, so the only option for the community or visitors was to purchase bottled water.To address this issue, a water filter and fountain were installed on already established rainwater tanks at the Purple Starfish on Kaniva’s main street. After numerous tests by community partner GWM Water, Louise and Jaden officially opened the #KanivaWater fountain on November 2^nd 2016.

Their project has also been set up to educate people about this important issue and solution via social media, hence the # in the title. You can continue to follow their journey on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter by searching for #KanivaWater.

Invasive Plant Removal at Mathis Pond

2016 Grass Valley, California, USA

When Nåah Lifland, of Sierra Academy of Expeditionary Learning, was asked how he could improve his watershed, he immediately thought of Mathis Pond Preserve, an area that students from his school visit to get field experience with water quality sampling.

Nåah proposed to expand stewardship activities at the pond by organizing invasive plant removal efforts. These efforts would allow the native plants to flourish and provide more suitable wildlife habitat in the area. With funding from Nutrien, Nåah was able to purchase tools for the task of removing the invasive species, particularly Himalayan blackberries.

During the 2016/17 school year, 65 students visited the site four times and removed blackberries for four hours on each visit, totaling 1,040 hours of service improving the habitat at Mathis Pond. Future students will also use the tools to continue stewardship of the Preserve.

Cleaning Garcia Bend

2016 Sacramento, California, USA

Garcia Bend Park is a neighborhood park on the banks of the Sacramento River. Trash and debris left here by visitors or illegally dumped here continues to be an ongoing issue. Unfortunately, most of that trash ends up directly entering the adjacent waters, and directly or indirectly harming aquatic wildlife. Alexa Smith and Priscilla Dawson wanted to practice good stewardship of their watershed and encourage others to do the same. Alexa, who has been involved in clean-ups before, understood how eye-opening clean-ups can be; seeing all the accumulated debris directly can make students think twice before littering themselves and inspire them to take action. Priscilla and Alexa organized a group from The MET Sacramento to return to this area. In one morning, they collected 11 bags of trash from the park! Students enjoyed being outdoors while doing something good for their community and the watershed.

Southside Park Clean Up

2016 Sacramento, California, USA

For this year’s Caring for Our Watershed project, Molly Crofoot and Miana Muscat of The MET Sacramento focused on a park/pond area adjacent to their school. Their goal was to build on the success of past clean-up efforts, and organize more volunteers to thoroughly cover a greater area than previous efforts. The duo also expressed the possibility of building an annual, if not bi-annual tradition of involving their classmates as stewards of this park, as it is so close to their campus. To that end, Molly and Miana recruited approximately 30 volunteers to help with their clean-up event at Southside Park. Because they had so many volunteers, they split into groups for litter pick-up as well as invasive species removal. Molly and her classmates reported having a fun day in the field, and getting a lot accomplished. This clean-up was completed with perfect timing, as it was just before the Earth Day celebration was to be held at the park.

Bat Boxes at Del Paso Park

2016 Sacramento, California, USA

In his Caring for Our Watersheds proposal, Ryan Kizer explained that building and installing bat boxes in a local park would not only provide habitat for bats to expand their population, but would also help to create natural control of pests, especially mosquitoes. This natural pest control would reduce the need for use of pesticides, which can be costly and may have negative effects on the environment, wildlife, and/or human health. With project funding from Nutrien, Ryan constructed 4 bat boxes. After he painted the boxes and put asphalt shingles on the roof areas, he mounted them on poles in 2 different areas of Del Paso Park. In the next few years, bats will move into the safe environment of the boxes. These bats will also provide natural pest control to the area, as well as a cool show for visitors as they exit the box at dusk to feed!

Crayola Colour Cycle!

2016, Trenton, Ontario, Canada

Marker Recycling Student Action Project Ontario

In 2016, a student named Melissa from Murray Centennial Public School proposed an idea of the “Crayola Colour Cycle” that will help to improve the waste management at her school. Melissa will educate the school on her project before she begins. She will also be holding a colouring contest for primary grades the winner gets a Crayola t-shirt, and handing out stickers to the other classes that say “I recycle” on them.

She did the“Crayola Colour Cycle” project throughout her school where she got all the students and staff to bring in markers, pens and highlighters that they have at school or at home. Once they brought them in they would be collected, then later shipped back to Crayola where they will be recycled properly through a company called JBI. They specialize in recycling dense plastics. This project was implemented in November 2016, with the help of her school.

This project is going to help reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfills as well as the amount of energy needed to make brand new products for the future.