TASIS Wildlife Club Spring Update

TASIS Wildlife Club continued to meet through the cold and wet winter. Our main focus was learning more about how the world is interconnected, and therefore how important it is to build up the sustainability of our school community. At a school like ours, it is more challenging, as the children tend to only stay at our school for two years before they move onto somewhere else in the world. Yet, despite this challenge, our club has done wonderful work. Our biggest accomplishment this school year has been implementing and maintaining our Lower School composting program.Each day, the composting bins are placed on the tables, and at the end of lunch, the fruit and vegetable waste is taken to a big composting bin in our garden. Every so often, we monitor and take photos of what we find in the bin. Recently, we were quite shocked to see that half of the waste was untouched food!! We discussed that not only is this a selfish and wasteful practice, but it is also a waste of finances that could be used to benefit our sustainability program. So, we took a photograph, and recently presented it and our concerns to the entire Lower School at assembly.As well as the untouched food that goes into the compost, we have also been concerned about the uneaten cooked food that gets thrown away each day. We have stopped students at lunch, as they were throwing food away, to find out why they are wasting.Many people said that the kitchen servers give them helpings that are too big. We asked them why they did not just ask for less, and they claimed that they did. So, our club members went last week to have a meeting with the assistant manager of the kitchen. We explained the problem of the students served too much food. He promised to talk to the servers to tell them to give smaller portions. All students are allowed to go back for seconds, so there is no need to serve large amounts the first time around. We will be monitoring to see if things improve.We have told the Lower School that if we waste less, we can spend less on food, and then use the money saved on new projects. We do have a few amount of solar panels on school buildings, but we would like to see this increased. The money we save can go towards this!We will be interested to see how things improve. We have placed photos and posters in the dining room, hoping that this encourages students to think about what they need to take to eat at lunch. Others projects are initiating Earth Hour Activities. Our club members have shown the Earth Hour film to the Lower School, and we have plans to find out how each student celebrates this time. Earth Hour takes place on the first day of our break, so we will be working on celebrating an early Earth Hour at school on the Friday before! More about this soon!!