Earth Hour & Solar Ovens

The TDSB will be taking part in Earth Hour on Friday March 26th from 2pm-3pm. Eco-Schools has put out an Earth Hour challenge to all schools to create solar ovens or do some sort of electricity free activity.
After school our Eco-Club will be making solar ovens for Friday's Earth Hour. The ones we will be making are made from pizza boxes, aluminium foil, oven bags, black construction paper, news print, and a little tape.

I built one the other day so I would have a finished product to show the students and was surprised at how easy they are to make. Unfortunately it has been over cast and rainy so I haven't had a chance to test it out and see how hot it can get. I'm sure that we'll be able to melt cheese, but would we be able to boil water or cook an egg?
If Friday is a sunny day you're welcome to come and check out our Earth Hour Solar Oven Event!!!!

Toronto will be participating in Earth Hour on Saturday March 27th from 8:30pm-9:30pm

Bottled Water Free Week Warp-up

March 11th was Bottled Water Free Day. I challenged all the students at our school to not bring bottled water for the whole week. We also added the challenge of using a reusable container for all their drinks. I went around at lunch time giving out prizes to students that were able to meet this challenge.
I have to say that the students at our school did really well with this challenge. I nearly went broke giving out prizes! The primary students (and their parents) are doing an amazing job not only with re-usable drinking containers, but also with waste-free lunches. Now it's just getting them to bring anything that is waste home so it can be disposed of properly. The junior students on the other hand are another story. Though many of the students are good about re-usable water bottles their lunches are another story. This got me to thinking that each week students should be given a challenge to make their lunches more environmentally friendly. I'm also looking into what we can do for next year to make sure students are doing their best to bring waste-free lunches everyday. Maybe on curriculum night we can set up a waste-free lunch display and sell some inexpensive, re-usable containers.

Hope everyone has a great March break!

Kool-Aid Jammers

I was sent this link the other day about a fundraising program for schools. In a nut shell, the school collects Kool-Aid Jammers and Del Monte terra packs to receive 2cents for each one collected. That equals 20 dollars for every thousand collected. TerraCycle then uses the drink pouches to make tote bags, pencil case, etc.

Maybe this is something that our school should do?
I thought about it and realized that this recycling program doesn't really deal with the root of the problem. Our students should be bringing drinks to school in reusable containers. Also, there is little to no nutritional value in any of these drinks. 1 pouch (200ml) contains 24 grams of sugar, that's a little less than 6 teaspoons of sugar mixed with a little water. That's 90 empty calories of sugar water, how do think that would affect your ability to learn? Once all of these drink pouches have been collect they have to be driven to a UPS pick-up location where, I can only assume, they take another drive to a factory... seems like a lot of energy to recycle something that isn't good for so many reasons.

It would be nice to be part of this fundraising campaign, but I don't want to encourage students to consume a product and think that they're doing something good. How about people don't buy them and then we don't have to worry about how to recycle them or worry about taking up space in land fills?

What Can I Recycle?

It seems like there is a lot of confusion out there about what you can and cannot put into the city recycling bins. It looks like the city has caught on to this and retooled their web page to make it easier to figure out what goes where.
Follow this link for more information.