Awards

Vision

Our vision for Canada is… to become leaders in green sustainability. Our project addresses single use plastics and the enormous environmental impacts they are having on our land and waterways when disposed of, and our airways when being produced and transported. Bringing attention to single use plastics are an important issue to our community to stop the cycle of mindlessness and demonstrated that simple solutions can be effective to reduce our ecological footprint.

Action

On Earth Day, students will create reusable and compostable bees wax and cotton food wrap to replace the use of plastic bags and plastic food wrap. During the week of Earth Day (April 23-27, 2018) we ran a sustainability campaign where students observed doing sustainable behaviors were given ballots from teachers to enter for titanium water bottles with the MMC logo. Each teacher was given a bundle of tickets to distribute as they saw fit and many ballots filled our box. We drew 10 names per day over the PA system and handed out the water bottles accordingly. Students were eager to demonstrate the sustainable behaviors they were practicing such as active transportation, litterless meals, using refillable water bottles, recycling, etc. Students who demonstrated initiative for their sustainable behaviors were given ballots in class/TA/in the hallways. They were then recognized before the school over the PA announcements for their leadership in sustainable actions when we drew the water bottles. The campaign was based on students independently taking the initiative to behave sustainably.

Reflection & Celebration

Our initiative was very successful. We received glowing feedback for the beeswax food wrap workshop and students and staff have reported eye-opening transformations on their consumption of single use plastics. Furthermore in a ‘Sustainability Challenge’, students were tasked with identifying an ESD related deficiency in our school and submitting a solution to the ESD committee. We had many submissions and the winning submission was to implement an urban beehive on our school grounds in the 2018-19 school year. This is the third year we have held the annual Sustainability Challenge in our TA groups. Each year we ensure to make change by applying for grants so that our Sustainability Challenge can be successful.