Upcycling at Roedean

Posted: 01 August 2018

Students at Roedean have found a way to combine their social and environmental ambitions through a series of upcycling initiatives. The school transforms waste products into learning resources and materials for disadvantaged communities, helping build students’ consciousness of waste avoidance, whilst making a tangible contribution to local communities in need.

Author and position: Bea Toniolo, French Teacher

School: Roedean School is a girls’ school based in the vibrant city of Johannesburg, South Africa. It provides day and boarding facilities to around 800 pupils across its junior and high schools.

Introduction

Two years ago, I volunteered to oversee the school’s environmental activities. Despite our best intentions, activity on this front had stagnated and the environmental committee lacked a structure and focus. As a school, we are situated in an economically diverse area where the privileged and underprivileged are within close proximity, yet we can often live very isolated existences. A lot of our environmental work has a strong social awareness aspect, as efforts to engage with local communities in environmental projects expose our students to the realities of life faced by disadvantaged communities.

Planning

When I first started in this role, it was a case of getting stuck in and working closely with our social responsibility co-ordinator, Charlotte Hulley, to kick-start projects which needed a bit of impetus.

I reactivated a series of projects, including the relationship the school had with a local organic farm, where students now volunteer to learn more about permaculture, but one area of particular concern for us was that of waste. We used the forum of our amphitheatre to have a ‘crates session’, to ascertain what aspect of the school was of greatest environmental concern for the students. ‘Crates’ is a forum that was introduced at the school to give students an informal space in which to voice their opinions. They are invited to stand up on an upturned crate in the centre, and freely express how they feel about an issue. The crates session focusing on the environmental challenges at our school revealed that many students were primarily concerned about the waste we produce as a community. We discussed the types of everyday objects that often end-up as waste, but also began to explore how these could be re-used and upcycled in other ways.

Like many cities, one does not have to go far in Johannesburg to see just how much waste local communities accumulate. There is a particular issue in dealing with plastic waste, which was brought into focus brilliantly by a local theatre company, who performed a thought provoking play entitled Plastocracy to the students, using a human-size puppet made out of discarded plastic, which the actors had collected at a local dump site.  The show encouraged us to re-consider how much waste we all create, which we discussed in some depth during a Q&A session afterwards.

Activity

Upcycling waste for educational materials

Many of our local public creches are situated in small facilities with limited materials, and some of the things we consider as waste can actually be remade into useful teaching resources.

Through our eco committee student reps, we encouraged all the students to bring in unwanted materials for upcycling. Leftover cardboard was transformed into fun board games for the children, plastic containers found a new life as stationery boxes and material for science experiments, sponges and polystyrene trays were used for Art lessons, bottle caps to develop early numeracy skills.

Donations were brought to my classroom which soon became submerged in all sorts of (clean!) waste, but this also helped show, very visibly, the amount of waste that households usually send to landfill, that can easily be repurposed.

We continue to deliver our waste items to an early childhood development NGO, Flying Children, several times each term, and have been delighted to receive a visit from some of the creche owners to learn more about how our donations have been upcycled and used to benefit the children.

Eco-Camp (Greenpop, Zambia & South Africa)

Greenpop’s camps puts our students in a unique environment and challenges them to live ‘waste-free’ for a period of 7 days. Greenpop visits our school to discuss the camps offered, and their eco aims, and girls voluntarily sign up for this experience. Whilst living on the camp, the girls eat a primarily vegetarian diet and live according to zero-waste principles, with any unused items upcycled in some way.

Outside their tent, they have a plastic bottle to be packed with non-recyclable waste items. Each bottle is so tightly packed, it results in a container that is incredibly strong and as such, has a use as a construction material: they have been given the moniker ‘eco bricks’.

The girls were hugely inspired by their experience in Zambia in 2017, and transferred their enthusiasm to other students when they returned to school.  Our camping team were also accompanied by a teacher chaperone, which provided another means for ensuring that some of the ideas and initiatives from this experience came back into the school to shape our own thinking. In 2018, our girls will be visiting a Greenpop camp that will based in an area near Knysna, the Eden District, which was badly affected by devastating wildfires during 2017. The camp this year focuses on “regeneration through introducing ecosystem services, removing alien vegetation, planting indigenous vegetation and catchment management”. https://greenpop.org/eden-festival-of-action/

Eco bricks for school facilities

Inspired by the experience on the Greenpop Camp, we encouraged every student to bring an eco brick from home with the target of creating 1000 eco bricks. As with the tools created by our students at green camp, eco bricks are created by packing a plastic bottle (500ml was recommended) with non-recyclable materials. The key to their effective use lies in packing all the materials tightly, so students were advised to use a wooden spoon to pack each item into the container. It was an initiative that we had to manage carefully, as we did not want students to purposefully purchase non-recyclable materials (such as crisp packets, sweet wrappers, cling film, and polystyrene which is not yet recycled here) to create their brick, as that would clearly defeat the objective of the exercise! To mitigate this, we were very clear with the students that the purpose of the exercise was to reduce the overall waste that we would ordinarily send to a landfill. It was imperative to give sufficient time for them to collect their materials, but we learnt that the average household in our community could easily fill 2 or 3 eco bricks (or ‘bottle-bricks’) every 3-4 days!

The schools’ Environmental Committee was responsible for checking each eco brick brought into school to ensure the container was robust, whilst also keeping tabs on numbers.

Once we had collated a sufficient number of bricks, we took these to a local school in a disadvantaged area (one of the schools that are part of the Flying Children organisation) and used it to build a bench in their playground. The bench allows elders to sit and enjoy the outside air whilst watching the children play. Whilst the items within the bricks are, in essence, waste, the overall visual effect is very interesting and quirky! The bench also has the advantage of being made of a material that can last for many years.

Challenges

• Structure of the Environmental Committee – Historically, the school’s environmental committee was made-up of a representative from each class in the High School. Whilst this helped build a sizeable team, representative of each stage of the school, it also meant that from time to time, some individuals were less engaged than others in environmental activities, as the role was compulsory rather than voluntary. The impact of this was starting to show, as the lack of engagement of some was starting to dampen the enthusiasm of others. Another aspect that was a little challenging for us was the limited time we had to meet and discuss our plans. The school’s environmental committee used to meet during morning breaks, which meant that the students were hurriedly eating whilst having the meeting, and we had insufficient time to discuss actions and progress. We were also eager to shift the focus from teacher-led to student-driven activities.
• To address these issues, we gained permission to overhaul the structure and dispense with the compulsory representation. In its place, several teachers have worked to set-up an Eco Club, and invite students to join. The expectations of the committee members have changed; rather than simply being ‘messengers’ of eco news for their class, the volunteer recognise that they have responsibilities to drive environmental awareness and behaviours among their peers (whilst having a lot of fun too!). The times that we meet have changed: we now use a lunch break and an early morning session, alternating each week to allow students with different schedules to join. This gives more time for discussion and learning, for example, using the additional time to watch TED talks. The girls run the meetings themselves now, and having the space to learn and discuss our activities makes the experience so much more rewarding for those involved.
• Accurate information – It can be difficult to get hold of accurate information on what is and isn’t recyclable in this country, and more specifically at our school. Roedean Environmental Committee reps did some research, contacted our school’s recycling company, and came up with an awareness poster last year. Since then, the recycling company that services our school has changed, and we are in the process of repeating the exercise to ensure information posters around the school are up to date.

Impact

It has been heart-warming to see the impact of our work in our upcycling projects and to learn how this is making a difference to young students in disadvantaged communities.

The focus on upcycling has also galvanised our students to think more deeply about the issue of waste reduction. A member of our new Eco Club is currently on a mission to reduce the use of plastic cups in the school, which are sold by our tuck shop. We encouraged this eager student to do their own research to find alternatives, source quotes, and identify biodegradable and compostable alternatives. The student took the challenge is and currently personally engaged in negotiations with the tuck shop owners to introduce more eco-friendly compostable cups.

The Future

For our farm partnership, we would like to look at more ways that we can move the farm towards a sustainable, independent business model and to complement this work by investing in our own organic vegetable garden staffed by volunteer parents.

We also hope to introduce bokashi bins to the school and students’ families. These are hermetically sealed bins filled with a bran containing live microorganisms that will enable us to convert our food waste into compost and ‘bokashi tea’ (a natural fertiliser).

In the year ahead, we look forward to drawing upon the expertise of Eco Schools. This is a global programme linked to the curriculum, which involves the whole school and wider community. The programme is one of the biggest in the world, with a presence in 64 countries, so we are excited about the opportunities to learn from the experience of others and follow best practice advice on sustainability issues.

Advice

• Remember that change takes time – It can take weeks, months or years to see the impact of your activities, particularly when it comes to changing attitudes and long-term behaviour – so don’t be despondent if you do not see change overnight!
• Call on the resources of environmental educational organisations – Working with Eco Schools will provide us with a structure and resources for our activities.
• Get every strata of the school on board – Get as many advocates and enthusiasts as you can: management, colleagues, students and parents. Look at ways to get them directly involved in the work to heighten their engagement and enthusiasm for environmental activities.