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Say No! to Plastic Straws

Vision

Our vision for Canada is… to be leaders in the drive to protect and preserve our environment. We have a Social Justice group at RMS that is passionate about preserving and protecting our natural world. We feel that the consumption of one use plastics are a problem at our school and in our community. ( We surveyed our students and collected evidence ) Our hope that this one action will lead to many others.

Action

We first surveyed our school to inquire into what the students felt the biggest issues in our school and community were. The students identified litter as being one of the big environmental issues. The community builders team of students narrowed it down to single use plastics as being one of the major issues they wanted to address. One of our students, Leko, connected single use plastics to our hot lunch program and assessed our program to see if we had any single use plastics in our school lunches. She found that we were using plastic straws, plastic forks and knives, plastic lids, plastic cups and boxes. With the budget available she created a compostable or biodegradable product wish list from green companies online. (Greenmunch.ca) She knew that plastic straws are one of the lead contributors to single use plastics that are littering our environment and decided to start with the straws. We ordered in 2400 paper straws for our hot lunch program. Our hot lunch co-ordinators were more than willing to take part in the project and we have cancelled the straw order from the food provider.

We started to create an awareness program following the #stopsucking lead. But have changed direction since and our looking at more of an overall awareness program that is more informative and transformative.

Reflection & Celebration

We are still in progress as the next issue we would like to address are the one use plastic forks and knives that are being used in out hot lunch program. Something that we did notice is that the #stopsucking campaign drew attention at our school but missed the target, kids laughed at the idea but did not really understand the bigger picture.

12. Responsible Consumption and Production
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