Painting – It Comes Naturally

2017, Warren, Manitoba, Canada

paint nite student action

Rebecca Myskiw is a student at Warren Collegiate in Warren, Manitoba. She saw the potential to make a popular trend into an opportunity to educate the people of her community with a fun paint night! Paint nights are becoming something of a trend, but Rebecca’s special paint night had a twist- she had the participants use environmentally friendly paints to keep her watershed healthy! Regular paints include toxins and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can end up in our waterways and environment. Rebecca found Natural Paints that are 100% eco-friendly, containing no toxins or VOCs! She did not stop at a simple paint night, either. Rebecca donated the supplies (paint brushes, easels, extra paint) to her school’s Art Program after the paint night, so that her school could become more watershed-friendly, as well! Rebecca student action

“Natural Paints are an incredible way to care for our watershed. They don’t solve the problem, but they do help stop it. If I can reduce the amount of regular paints used in the school, I can reduce the amount of pollutants going into the watershed and help care for it with a simple idea for everyone.”

Slam Poetry

2017, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Breela Bailey Slam Poetry implementation Manitoba

Breela Bailey from Miles Macdonell Collegiate came up with a simple yet effective way to spread awareness of watershed issues to both youth and adults. She decided to write and produce a slam poem about watershed health and create a video to spread awareness.

“The reason there aren’t many changes being made is because the lack of education. Educating people will make a difference on a larger scale. This is sure enough to start off as a local project but we are hoping that once put out to the public it will be all over Canada. We hope this will affect everyone and show what big differences we can make in our own homes.”

Breela, along with a friend who narrated and donated the use of the equipment, put together a powerful video, which is now available for everyone to view on youtube.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIYXoqDoVQQ

Water Well Wasted

2017, Selkirk, Manitoba, Canada

MB Water Well Wasted Student Action

Nicole Buckle of Lord Selkirk Regional Comprehensive Secondary School in wanted to make a change in her home of Selkirk, Manitoba. An important part of her community is the public swimming pool. Through some testing, she determined that the shower flow rate in the change rooms could be improved by changing all of the showerheads to a low-flow option. This simple change will save thousands of gallons of water every year!

“After switching out the showerheads in the school, and after seeing the positive changes it is making to our watershed, hopefully it will encourage more people to do so in their own homes. Since the pool is so widely used among the community, it is something that will affect a lot of people in Selkirk, all the while helping the watershed.”

Bottles for Our Future

2017, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

students with water filling station

Plastic water bottles are becoming more of a problem every day. Making bottled water uses fossil fuels, wastes energy, costs a lot of money, and creates pollution when the bottles are not properly recycled. Anne Ocampo and Jessica Tran of Garden City Collegiate decided that they wanted to come up with a way to reduce the amount of plastic water bottles ending up in their watershed by finding an alternative. In a high school with around 1500 students and staff, the girls realized there was only one reusable bottle refill station.

“For a growing high school, it becomes difficult to share simply one water refilling station between 1500 students and staff combined. Students are provided with a schedule that sometimes becomes difficult to make time to wait in a long line to refill their water bottles. It sometimes seems hard to access and utilize, and because of that, plastic water bottles have become their companion.”

With the single filling station being located at one end of the school, it was often difficult to get to between classes. The line-ups could be lengthy, and there often just was not time to wait.

“Choosing to use a reusable water bottle over purchasing plastic water bottles is a small change that can contribute to a bigger change. Having a whole community come together and make these changes will bring us one step closer to overcoming a contributing factor to what damages our local watershed.”

Garburating, Not the Green Option We Thought it Was!

2017, Selkirk, Manitoba, Canada

Anna-Marie Svistoun works in the cafeteria at her high school, Lord Selkirk Regional Comprehensive Secondary School in Selkirk, MB. She noticed that a lot of food waste was getting into her watershed through the garburator in the cafeteria. Anna-Marie came up with a solution: a strainer to collect more of the solid waste and separate it. The garburator at her school used more water for solid waste disposal than liquids, so to remove some of those solids, she would be decreasing water use. Another benefit to Anna-Marie’s solution is that it takes a lot of the organic waste that would end up in the water system out to be disposed of. A simple solution to an everyday problem!

“My project will have a lasting effect, as over 200 students take the Culinary Arts program in our school. Once my colander is implemented, the students will learn not to use their garburators at home. This will have a lasting impact on my watershed in years to come.”

Rods and Reels

2017, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Grade 10 s Rods and Reels Implementation Manitoba tudents at Elmwood High School in Winnipeg, Manitoba are passionate about sustainability! Their sustainability team has come up with a “Rods and Reels” program that aims to educate youth about sustainable fishing practices and how this can impact their environment and watershed. Students will learn skills such as how to properly debarb a hook, the importance of why, as well as conservation limits and how this links to overall watershed health. This lesson will culminate in a class fishing trip so they can learn practicing proper fishing etiquette and connect with nature.

Through the Caring for our Watersheds contest, a class set of fishing rods were purchased for the school so this program can continue to educate youth about the sustainable use of our water for years to come.

Losing Tides – A Watershed Awareness Dance Show

2017, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Hunter Watson and Alyssa Lee from Westwood Collegiate came up with one of the most unique projects seen to date. They chose to look at Watershed Awareness through Dance with spectacular evening including dance, watershed information booths, and guest speakers from watershed community partners. Losing Tides Watershed Awareness Show Student Project Manitoba

“As students who are very involved in the arts in school and around the community, immediately we were reminded of how often we are told about how much dance can have an impact on people. That thought gave us the idea to create a dance show with every dance revolving around water and our watersheds. The damages we have done to it, the beauty it has, and how important it is to preserve it.

Each dance will have images projected on the screen that will help to enhance the dance and its losing tides watershed awareness show manitoba meaning. Some dances will deal with the pollution side to our effect on our watersheds, some will focus on how our watersheds could and should look like all reflecting behind the dancer.

Seeing the issues and solutions through dance, pictures and speakers that can range from high school students to well-known organizations will surely leave an impact on the audience. This is something that has never been done before but we are confident we can do this right.”

This event attracted over 200 participants and ended with a well-deserved standing ovation standing ovation.

Battery Recycling

2017 Cinncinnati, Ohio, USA

Lexi Meckes is a nanny for three kids after battery recycling ohio student implementation school and is always having to switch out old batteries in game systems. Through this experience she became aware of how many batteries were being tossed out. She started becoming more concerned about the problem as she researched the chemicals inside every single battery and began thinking about the impact these batteries have on our environment. As a senior at Sycamore High School she has been involved in Environmental Club, AP Environmental class, and engineering. With her background knowledge and interest she became motivated to help solve this problem.

When Lexi was introduced to the Caring For Our Watersheds project she knew right away that she wanted to work on a project concerning batteries. She saw a big problem in her community and figured out a simple, direct way she could improve this issue. For her Caring For Our Watersheds battery recycling ohio student project project, Lexi put in place a battery-recycling program in all the schools within the Sycamore School District. These pails are located in the front offices of all schools and have begun overflowing with all the donations from community residents. She hopes recycling batteries becomes just as routine as recycling paper and plastic. With this permanent project Lexi hopes to educate her community on the simple actions they can take to make a big difference.

After the project got started, the company changed their prices and it became too expensive to mail the filled buckets, so Lexi set up a meeting with a local recycling company to discuss where she can send or take the batteries to locally for recycling. Although Lexi has experienced a few bumps along the way, her project has definite staying power because of the broad community support and participation.

She hopes this project will grow into a citywide program and prevent thousands of batteries from ending up in the landfill.

Smarter Sprinkler Systems

2017, Milliken, Colorado, USA

While researching ideas for the Caring for Our Watersheds project, Tyler, Patrick and Cameron discovered a gigantic waste of water at their high school. The district was watering the recreational fields around the school. They studied and analyzed the watering period, amount, location, dates, etc., and concluded the watering style was inefficient and wasteful. To solve this issue, they proposed the implementation of WR2 rain gauge sensors. These sensors would stop the watering of the fields when rain or soil saturation is abundant and additional water would be wasteful. These sensors would not only save water, but also save money for the school, making it appealing to both environmental focused administratio Colorado student project smarter sprinkler n and budget focused as well. The students worked with the school district and installed three WR2 rain gauge sensors which have reduced water usage by 30-50%. They will be monitoring the water usage during 2017-2018 and reporting back to the school administration.

Rain Away!

2017 Berthoud, Colorado, USA

Emma Garner
Berthoud High School, Berthoud, Colorado

Emma Garner identified an area at Berthoud High School where most of the parking lot runoff accumulates. As a result, the area has become a soggy-muddy area filled with automobile oil and trash. Emma decided to build a rain garden in this area to filter out project rain away colorado student action project contaminates that are deposited there from the parking lot. Although the rain garden is a small site test, it can be expanded in the future by the school.