Vision

Our vision for Canada is to be champions of sustainability; a nation in which cares for its people, planet, and prosperity. We all live in a world of excess, as consumers, we as individuals can all take small concrete steps in our everyday lives to reduce the amount of waste that ends up in our landfill.
Our project addresses waste reduction by encouraging the use of real utensils verses using plastic disposable utensils. By encouraging students in our school to use real forks and spoons we have also helped students become economical with their money by avoiding the unnecessary purchase of plastic utensils for lunch everyday from the school cafeteria.
With 39% of our students coming from families living below the Low Income Cut Off and 48% living in single parent families it is an important issue to learn how to be economically savvy. In our community being money smart and learning to save where you can is essential to achieving prosperity.

Action

Elmwood High School is encouraging its student population to ditch the use of plastic disposable utensils and opt to use reusable utensils. To promote the use of a real spoon and fork, Elmwood’s sustainability group is sewing washable utensil pouches that will be distributed to students in the fall who bring in their own fork and spoon. The material used to create these pouches were all end roll material donated from Canada Goose Company that were destined for the dump. The idea of utensil pouches is for students to keep these utensil pouches in their lockers instead of purchasing plastic forks and spoons for lunch from the cafeteria. At our school a nominal fee is charged for using plastic utensils. Not only will we help the environment by reducing the amount of plastic waste that would end up in our landfill, but we will also help students save their lunch money and be more economical.
Our school’s population has over 800 students, hypothetically if half the school’s population bought lunch each day and required a plastic utensil that costs each student an extra 10 cents than technically 80,000 utensils would go in the landfill each school calendar year and $8000 spent on plastic. By encouraging the use of a real fork and spoon, we could prevent 80,000 plastic utensils from filing our landfill, and save our community from unnecessarily spending $8000.