We are delighted to share a blog written by student Yareny Castellanos from Abundant Life Christian School, who is part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2019-20 Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 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.
It‘s going to be hard, but hard doesn’t mean impossible.
Project Overview
Our ecological project known as Moo Paper consists of making ecological notebooks made out of cow feces. The ingredient that makes it possible to accomplish this project is the cellulose that the cow feces contains. Cows basically eat grass and the amount of animal manure the cow produces daily lets us provide ecologic pages.
We can make several examples with this paper such as journals, bookmarks, and notebooks. We want to provide them to people who can’t afford this school supply and to companies, so everyone stops using the normal pages and replace them by using our pages. We want everyone to take care of the environment because if we provide these sheets of paper we can avoid global warming and deforestation.
We span four global goals including Goal 4: Quality Education; Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure; Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Goal 15:Life on Land.
Our Journey
During the development of our ecological pages, we gained skills such as: how to use an Erlenmeyer flask properly, how to take samples depending on the substance to whitten the cow manure, how to weigh heavy substances such as cow feces and also how to make sheets of paper from alternative raw materials.
As a team, we learned many things such as: how to manage things between the school and the development of a project that takes a lot of time. We also learned how to write a journal properly with the help of our grammar and chemistry teachers.
The most difficult aspect and the biggest challenge we faced during the process of our project is to measure the exact amount of cow feces, water, recycled paper, and chemicals to whiten the paper but our chemistry teacher helped us to use accurate measure for the ingredients we had to use to develop this ecologic project.
The Next Chapter
We would like to make people realize that this paper won’t smell bad and they would be able to write in it without any problem.
We should introduce this project to a company that is in charge of producing notebooks and state them that the agendas composed of high-quality pages we are planning to produce are very cheap.
The materials we bought are somehow cheap to produce a bullet journal. The best of this is that we do not need trees to be cut off or burned because the agendas are made of cow manure which is a material that people don’t care about and wastes all the time.
During the process of developing our project we researched info from the internet and we also got help from our chemistry teacher to accomplish this ecological project. The art teacher also helped in the process of making the pages for an ecological notebook by teaching us how to use the wooden rack to obtain the paper.
For next week we are planning to give some samples of the ecological bullet journal and we will be asking people about how is quality, how does it feel, how does it smell, if it easy to write in, and if they would use this notebook.
The 2019-20 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2020. 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.
