By Ana Sofia Reyna, Y13
La Grande Boissière community is made up of 1900 students and their families. More than 6000 people can have a HUGE impact on our environment. As much as we would like to ignore it, one person in a year releases approximately 20 metric tons of Carbon Dioxide emissions. The saying “One person can make a big difference” may sound a little exaggerated, but it does not make it any less true.
The Eco Committee is not only aiming to reduce the environmental impact of the campus, but also to encourage each member of the community to take individual action. It is not a simple task, but LGB is pulling through! Our campus recently has taken on three initiatives that might sound small compared to the issues our world is facing today, but that raise hope for possibly larger projects in the future.
Every day our teachers handout multiple stapled hard copies of worksheets, quizzes, and tests. Sadly, this can be harmful to our environment. Every printer at our school now has a new function: Eco Staples. Eco Staples is a new way of keeping your pages together, just as effectively as a metal staple would. The printers now are capable of pressing on the corner of a bundle of papers to stick together. These FREE Eco Staplers reduce our use of metal staples, which are usually not recycled. This may become a new source to fund new Eco-friendly tools for our campus.
However, Eco-friendly tools are not the only things our school has implemented. The Eco Committee has spoken with the heads of our school and have come to an agreement to ban single-use plastics! A ban might sound radical but the role a single-use plastic has on our day-to-day life can quite easily be modified with reusable items instead. For example, using reusable water bottles:
- Reduces plastic pollution,
- Assures the water source (which means you know what you are putting into your body),
- Reduces potential health hazards,
- Lasts longer than a single-use plastic bottle!
Finally, one of the other initiatives the Eco Committee has taken on is implementing Pizza Box Bins. These will facilitate the process of recycling for pizza boxes. At our campus, Service Technique is in charge of collecting and recycling all the waste made by staff and students. The one individual, Alexandre, simply doesn’t have the time to recycle our waste for us, so we all have to do our little bit to help him out. Unfortunately, these pizza box bins have yet to be built and installed but will be in only a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, to make sure that this (see above) does not become a daily sight, there are places where the boxes can be recycled. Please place them in one of the two large black bins located in front of the STEM Center and above the hill going down to the CdA.
As you can see, little by little, our campus has begun to make changes to reduce our negative impacts on the environment. Luckily, the Eco Committee has even more projects in mind to keep these Eco-friendly actions going. A little preview of the future projects is “Car-Free Fridays.”
PS. Make sure to check out next week’s article to know all about “Car-Free Fridays”.
