OSC has many service groups, and the service which I participate in is Recycling and Sustainability. On thing we do in this service is collecting recycling from the school and sending it out to a recycling center. We also advocate for OSC to become a greener school and reduce our ecological footprint. Over the history of the service a few things we have done are;

  • Create a biogas plant to convert food waste into usable gas, which we can use for cooking. We have made some delicious popcorn recently using the biogas plant.

    Making some popcorn using the biogas plant

  • Drastically reduced the plastic usage at the canteen. We did this by removing disposable plastic utensils, plates and cups and replacing them with reusable versions.
  • Hosting Environment Day at OSC, where we advocate for a greener school, and one of the main focuses this year was for separating waste properly in the correct bins, as that is one of the main issues at school.

On October 31st we had a big haul of cardboard and paper collected, and I went with the truck to the recycling center. At the recycling center we unloaded all the waste to be weighed. We get paid per kilogram of items, and with the huge amount of waste we had we made a good Rs. 900.

The waste loaded up on the truck

Weighing up the cardboard

Weighing up some newspapers

If we are not at the recycling center we are back at school collecting waste and placing it in our recycling shed. Our method of collecting the waste is dividing into groups of 3-4 and going to the different sections of the school and knocking doors on classrooms and collecting their waste. Every teacher has a recycling box in which they put their paper, and we take from that.

For CAS, I have made multiple goals for this service and they are;

  • To attend the service sessions every Thursday.
  • To continue to help out in collecting recycling materials from around the school.
  • To go to the recycling center and see how the recycling waste is handled
  • Try and become leader of the service for next year

The work we do in this service relates to the learning outcome of demonstrating engagement with issues of global significance, the issue of course being reducing our ecological footprint of our school.

Overall I am excited for this year of recycling as we create new initiatives and continue to do our part in reducing our schools carbon footprint.