Being eco-conscious students, helped us reduce a considerable amount of packaging waste, and raise awareness about the amount of daily food-waste produced, which can be utilised in various ways instead of ending in the landfill.
Thus the following was decided by our ‘Eco-wardens’ students:-
Buy locally grown food to minimize the impact on the environment, and help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions;
Peeling vegetables bought from the local market
Making delicious ‘Ftira’ with local vegetables
Composting Vegetable scraps & leftovers;
Separating organic waste to reduce the size of the black bag,
Planting and growing our own vegetables to become a self-sufficient school;
Some members from the school community went to the Pitkali Market – the place where local grown fruit and vegetables are deposited by the Maltese farmers, to buy local products in bulk. We checked what we needed to buy beforehand to avoid overbuying. This contributed in having:- less waste, less food waste, less packaging which also reduce carbon footprint, also to be more eco-friendly we used the farmers’ crates instead of bags to reduce again the use of plastic bags and other packaging wraps.
We promoted this activity to parents, students’ relatives, and to the outer community on the day and even beforehand. This was promoted on our school’s website and Facebook page. We invited those involved to come to our school and join us for this special event, where even some parents offered us their help. To raise more awareness about less packaging, a Maltese Cart full of local products was also displayed in our school yard. Enthusiastically students had the important role of explaining to visitors the process of how this leads to decrease packaging by making them aware to buy local products and to plan better their shopping so to avoid unnecessary purchases. Other students promoted the purchase of unpacked food such as local vegetables while others took the important role to be in charge of making a good tasty bread (Maltese ftira) by using local products. This was given to all the visitors using reusable plates and cups, who sat down around the table in the school yard and enjoyed the meal. Although students were not able to force the visitors to finish what’s on their plates, however they tried to change the outcome of this situation. This is because the left overs and vegetable/food scrap was put into the compost bins which we have at our school which was created for this specific purpose. Also this was separated in the organic bins which we have in each classroom as such waste cannot be treated as waste anymore. It is estimated that 5.5kg of waste will be collected weekly in these organic bins which then will be collected by ‘WasteServ’ Malta and used in order to generate electricity.
This led us to another step to grow vegetables of our own by creating our school mini vegetable garden. Thus all students had the opportunity to participate, be shown and taught step by step how to plant vegetables/herbs seeds which are being cultivated at our schools’ greenhouse. These were all planted in the reused plastic water bottles to also promote recycling and reusing.
Thus this whole chain shows that from the beginning these initiatives promoted the implementation of raising awareness actions about less packaging and waste management as such waste cannot be treated as waste anymore, where all together we managed to utilise waste and save 100s of kilos of waste from our landfill. Food waste was weighted and recorded and their results were shown to raise awareness.