Vision

Our vision is to reduce single-use plastic coming into our school. To do this, we want to offer students a sustainable choice by making beverages available onsite with a BYOM (bring your own mug) program. Offering comparable beverages at a lower cost and making the transaction more environmentally sustainable is our primary goal.

Action

We started a student-run beverage bar in the library that promoted the use sustainable resources. Many students in our school patronize shops in the area that sell their products in single-use plastic cups. We noticed that many students enter the school with single-use cups, both in the morning and at lunch time. We wanted to reduce the number of single-use plastics coming into the building by giving students the option to purchase similar beverages from the school-based, student-run beverage bar. We wanted to promote a BYOM (bring your own mug) program and serve hot and cold beverages.

Reflection & Celebration

At this point, we have launched the cold beverages (fruit smoothies) and we are providing reusable cups that students return to us. We are working on how to promote the BYOM aspect as well, to cut down on the time and resources to wash the reusable cups. We are in the planning stages with our challenging needs students to work on offering hot beverages to students.

At this point, our data is showing that we are meeting the needs of a lot of students who might otherwise not have a healthy snack; the demographics of our patrons is different from our targeted demographic and we need to brainstorm how to reach the group that is purchasing items outside the school. The project is continuing through to the end of the school year and we will collect more data on the impact it is having.