Someone has wisely said,’The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.
As the human population and over consumption is growing, Nature’s assets are declining at unprecedented rates. The way the mankind is living is not sustainable.With growing needs and wants of humans, the amount of waste generated is also growing rapidly. Statistics indicate that there is a gigantic zone of waste disposal everywhere which is furtheran environmental hazard. In such a scenario, Waste Management involving all the stakeholders of this planet may be the answer.
The schools have the potential to transform the school environment into a learning laboratory to learn about the ways to reduce waste generation, manage waste in proper environment friendly manner and inculcate sustainable mindsets and practices for Waste generation and its management.
ASN has a robust Eco- policy in place for its learners to practice four-pronged approach- Aware, Connect, Commit and Transform.
To engage the learners from the primary years itself, the school started working under theInternational Ecoschool program in collaboration with Foundation for Environment Education (FEE) and Centre for Environment Education (CEE) in 2019.The school also clubbed hands with ‘Safai Bank of India’, Sustainability Centre Mumbai for eco-friendly disposal of Multi- layered Plastic (MLP). Our prime focus was collection of MLPs, inform students about the proper way to segregate waste at source and dispose wet waste in green bins and dry waste in blue bins at all times. Not only this, but our efforts also to sensitise students about the importance of segregation involved appointing monitors in each class to ensure safe disposal of waste, tracking the total number of wrappers collected at school, minimising the usage of plastic through a comprehensive project-basedplan.
To ensure that the learning continued even during pandemic, we seamlessly switched to online platform.We collaborated with parents and they too became a part of our litter less campaign. With the help of our eco-committee, we organised various webinarsfor the parents to help students with segregation of waste at source, collection of MLPs etc.Their assistance in online mode as partners in education is praiseworthy.
As we moved into the current year, under the able guidance of the Principal of the school, Ms. Swarnima Luthra, the highlight of the year involved our drive to collect MLPs at school for safe disposal and the schoolspearheaded the Mega Litter Less Drive joining hands with 32 schools of Delhi, NCR in collaboration with Safai Bank of India, Mumbai Sustainability Centre creating a sustainable pathway for Waste Management.An online training session was conducted for the representatives of the schools to take up the project in their respective schools.Our students actively participated in multi-farious activities like the MLP collection, podcasts creation, engaging themselves in plogging, conductingsurveys and audits, presenting creative ideas in the form of videos, trackingwaste, educating about 5Rs and creatinga new useful product from the waste collected at home. Students also came up with surprising ideas and re-used and re-cycled as much waste as possible. The positive learning was clearly visible through their actionable as the students were able to dispose more than 11000 MLPs responsibly.
We got an overwhelming response from students, parents and school communities for our campaign. Our journey of litterless campaign has been a grand success and we hope to continue it with greater participation involving all the stake holders in an endeavour of creating future netizens of this earth with sustainable mindsets.
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