Recycling and Sustainability

What the 'Recycling and Sustainability' Service activity is about:

(In red):Satyanshu- activity co-leader.
(In white):Jenn- activity co-leader.
(Photo credits: Mr. Lockwood)

In this activity, students are completely dedicated to collecting used paper and cardboard from the school campus and selling them to a nearby recycling center. We are directly engaging with an issue of global importance, which is waste management. We encourage both teachers and students to separate the paper/cardboard from the usual garbage and place them in a recycling box (which our group provides to every classroom) for collection later during our activity session. Recycling in general; is very important because it does not just reduce the amount of paper and cardboard made everyday, but it also reduces the raw wastage produced in total that is dumped everyday on garbage dumping sites located through out Colombo. This in turn greatly improves the hygiene conditions in Colombo and also reduces the spread of disease among people as well. What we also try to do in Recycling is that we make sure our school takes part in this cause as well. The collecting process is done in pairs so this gives me the opportunity to work collaboratively with others during each session. 

The large haul!:

On Thursday the 27th, we had our 4th Recycling and Sustainability Service session. On that day; as we had done on the previous days as well, our service group divided in to separate sub groups each consisting of two people each and we scouted around the entire school campus looking and collecting paper and cardboard from every classroom. My partner and I was in charge of collecting from the secondary library, primary library and the secondary office which in total consisted of about five 'recycling bin' hauls.

Left: me!    Right: Jenn
(Photo credits: Mr. Lockwood)

You might say this was just an ordinary day as always. However, this day had something more than what we usually have on a regular session and that was the sheer amount of paper we collected! We collected so much scrap that it did not even completely fit in to vehicle shown on the right.

This shows that we had saved a large amount of paper and cardboard from ending up with a raw sewage dump for just ONE day's time! Imagine what this means for a yearly basis.

I hope to work harder towards separating and collecting as much paper as we can in one day in order to save Colombo of unnecessary waste being added in to their dumping sites from OSC. On Thursday, I definitely showed a lot of perseverance and commitment due to the fact that we collected a lot of paper that day. Being a school, large amounts of paper will be wasted everyday and so reducing that is near impossible. Therefore I hope to do what we can do to work around this and still save recyclable material from being mixed together with usual garbage.