By Chiara Turrettini, Year 12
On the 9th of November, the Eco Committee, in collaboration with Antoine Liang (Strike Stuco’s Chairman) and Madame Fortier’s mentor group, went around the forest to pick up trash and help clean up our campus. The Eco Committee is a student-led group that creates projects each year to make our campus and the lives of Ecolint’s students more sustainable and eco-friendly. This project got lots of positive feedback from students and teachers.
A week before the cleanup, a document was sent to the year 9s with goals and questions to consider so that they understood why they would be participating. One goal of the cleanup was to assess the litter situation in the school forest. This was the most important goal because no one is aware of the litter situation and without the Eco Committee, the statistics for this would not be available. Another goal was to explore and learn more about the forest habitat, which demonstrates to the students the importance of preserving this habitat (another goal given to the year nine students) that we are fortunate to have on our campus. The last goal was for the students to be able to create posters to encourage recycling instead of littering around our beautiful campus. Some questions that were considered by the year nine students were: What is litter? Where does all the litter in our school come from? What impact does litter have on our environment? How can this behaviour be changed by us? After the clean up, the eco-committee hoped that the students would understand more and be able to answer these questions and encourage less litter.
The clean up took place during the year nine’s first mentor period and continued through break. Students were asked to bring gloves and trash bags to be able to pick up the litter around the forest. As the students walked around picking up rubbish, they learned more about the forest and even found some wild raspberries growing (picture shown below)! Chairman, Antoine Liang, walked with the students and taught them about the forest ecosystem such as the different mushrooms, insects and how they are useful for the environment. This clean up lasted approximately an hour and in total 3 full trash bags were collected.
One member of the eco-committee, Cecilia-Zoe Dell’osso, believed this to be “an eye-opening experience and it was nice to interact with the year nines.” She was also shocked with the amount of trash that they collected as it was a lot more than she expected. One improvement that she believed would benefit this experience is to learn what happens to the trash once they have picked it up. This is also one of the goals that the Eco-Committee is currently working on.
To conclude, this was an educational experience for both the year nines and the eco-committee. There will be more events like this in the near future but these will not be limited to the forest and instead will be campus-wide. We hope to see many of you taking part in these amazing experiences to keep our campus green!
