We are delighted to share a blog written by team ‘Sustainable Movement for Major Eco-mplishments,’ from The Columbus School who is 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.
After identifying this issue, we want to tackle it in a sustainable, effective manner.
Project Overview
Our project is focused mainly on taking the first step towards reducing plastic and paper usage in our school and recycling it as well. We identified carelessness and ignorance as the root of the issue, as many of our TCS community members neglect where their trash goes. For example, students and staff constantly threw organics or paper in the plastic bin, forcing the school to remove it, due to the fact that plastic got dirty and contaminated, making it useless for recycling.
We decided to take action and began to research. First, we interviewed a variety of people at our school, including teachers, students, and parents. We also reached out to a foundation called Fundación Llena una botella de amor (in English foundation Fill a Bottle with Love), which focuses on collecting first-use plastics and making them construction material for social work (aka. building houses for people in need). We learned about their process and why they collect plastic in 2.5 liter soda bottles. We are planning to implement this recollection method at our school, and donate the bottles to the Foundation.
Our Journey
We have practiced many skills, such as working as a team to be able to coordinate meetings and interviews. In addition, we have become more agile in managing social media, as we were presented with some problems when trying to create a non-personal account. We have learned that we are all passionate about this topic because is something that we would like to change in our community, and would really like to see projects such as the Foundation’s plastic recollection method to be placed all over our campus. The biggest challenge we will face is to accomplish our goal of reducing paper and plastic usage, as they are a big part of our daily tasks.
The Next Chapter
Our next steps include (but are not limited to) giving conferences to the little kids at our school to raise awareness and explore more creative options such as recycling bracelets and bags, and implementing the bottle to fill with plastic. In addition, we plan to encourage less paper and plastic usage at our school by exploring other alternatives to these.
To all the people out there who believe that they are not capable of change, we say that even a small action can make a big difference. We encourage people our age to join our cause because we’re the generation that’s going to keep living on after our parents, and we won’t have much of our earth if we keep doing what we are doing. We should not just criticize, but contribute with our own grain of salt.
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.
