Environment Week 2017

"Without a healthy environment we cannot end poverty or build prosperity. We all have a role to play in protecting our only home: we can use less plastics, drive less, waste less food and teach each other to care." — United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres

Monday 5^th June was World Environment Day, a day organised by the United Nations to raise awareness of the need to protect our environment. To support this global event, the community team together with the GreenR club organised several environmentally themed activities.

Year 7 Environmental design project

Over the last few weeks all year 7 students have been involved in designing innovative solutions to help make our school more environmentally friendly. Over 40 incredibly creative designs were submitted! A rigorous judging process took place including students from the GreenR club, school council and community committee as well as teachers from a range of departments.

The winning designs were:

Most creative design: The Mushroom Box by Alston Ng, Pun Siripun, Dream Pham and Kanghyun Park

Most environmentally friendly design: The Recycloboard by Janet Ngo and Tracey Le

Most informative and overall winning design: Plastic-Eating Bacteria by Khoa Tran and Duong Gia Boa Nguyen

Well done to all students in year 7 for taking part. These designs will be on display and if possible we hope to create one of the designs next term.

GreenR club activities:

‘Before the Flood’ documentary screening:

The GreenR club visited Save the Children, an international NGO (Non-governmental organisation) who deliver long-term environmental risk preparation and adaptation initiatives with communities around Vietnam and provide emergency relief to environmental disasters. During this trip, students met with the Southern Area Manager for Vietnam who provided a briefing on the current environmental situation in Vietnam. This visit motivated the students to organise a screening of ‘Before the Flood’, a highly informative documentary about climate change to help raise awareness within our school.

Bottle a plant activity:

To encourage more students to become ‘green-fingered’ and take an interest in helping to maintain our school garden, the GreenR club organised a ‘Bottle-a-plant’ activity. This involved the ‘up-cycling’ of plastic bottles discarded on the school site and turning them into flower pots.

Next term a new community ‘Garden project’ will be taking place to regenerate the garden.

PTG Pop-up shop – ‘Make More with Less’ project:

To raise awareness of the use of uniform across both campuses the ‘+/- project’ run by PTG members aims to up-cycle old and disused school uniforms. This entails the use of tailors at Friends for Street Children (a community partner of BIS HCMC) to create new and exciting items such as tote bags, draw string bags, pencil cases, bean bag toys and aprons. On Thursday lunch a pop-up shop on the undercroft was laid out for students to purchase up-cycled uniform products. Next year the GreenR club plan to promote the project, currently only running at APP, at APS and raise further awareness about up-cycling, sustainable use of clothing and how students can get involved.

A huge thank you to all students and teachers for supporting these activities throughout the week!

Samantha Hadley, Community Service Coordinator