Loydence Academy, Qatar |

Clean the world, one plastic bottle at a time!

We are delighted to share a blog written by Girls QTR, students at Loydence Academy who are part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2018-19 Global Goals Competition.

Their project is among over 620 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community. 

Exciting and amazing that we can help the animals and teach others by reducing the plastic used in our school!

Project Overview

Every time we go to the beach, the sea or near a lake we see lots of trash! This is terrible because animals in the water might become trapped or choke on the plastic – this needs to stop! We must help the animals like the turtle, dolphins, and seacows.

We noticed in school that students and teachers were using plastic cups and small bottles everyday and then just throwing them into the bin. Our project is to reduce waste and plastic in school and in our community. We want to raise awareness of how dangerous plastic can be to the environment and animals in the sea. Did you know it can take upto 450 years for plastic bottles to decompose!! This is where we will start in school!

Our Journey

We have learnt that children are interested and want to know information, they will help us if we ask. We started collecting plastic cups and bottles being used and built a tower with the cups from only 2 days. This has shown people how much we waste. Students now bring in their own water bottle and we have written a letter to the principal to order paper cups for the water fountain not plastic ones.

We were very excited to go to the first ever fully vegan cafe in Doha, we met with the founder and he told us all about how his cafe helps the environment by reusing wood to make furniture, recycling, selling drinks and food in glass jars, paper straws and he does not use any plastic for packaging. We also bought ourselves a bamboo straw.

The Next Chapter

We are organising a beach clean up for this week and make a partnership with the non-profit organisation DEAP, who work alongside the ministry of environment. They are coming in to teach all of Key Stage 2 about plastic waste and what it does to the environment. Then we are going to help clean up the environment ourselves as a school.

We would like to also get people to bring in all of their plastic bags at home to show parents how much is wasted their aswell, try and get people to use reusable bags.

We want to reduce the amount of plastic used in Doha! Every one person can help make a change! And we have started that change!

The 2018-19 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2019. If you belong to one of the 700+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.