School News: Waste

My school wastes. We waste paper, electricity, resources, food. And, whether you like it or not, you also do. But we must try our hardest to reduce the amount we waste.

Schools, like several other communities, really don’t seem to be trying very hard. Maybe it’s because the people in them pass the responsibility onto someone else, or maybe it’s just that they’re plain lazy and can’t be bothered. But, hold on, I’m using the word ‘they’. I am part of the school. Maybe it’s up to me to do something.

Cotham is just one of the communities that I am a part of. Everyone is a part of some sort of community; therefore everyone should have the responsibility to try to make a change. Or are we just going to leave it to ‘them’ to take action?

 I’m also a part of the student leadership group at Cotham. We deal with various issues, but I realized a while back that I was passionate about the environment. I’m now part of a subgroup that looks at these problems at our school to do with saving, and not wasting. We’ve got loads ideas of changes we want to make for the school- changing the energy supplier to one which runs on wind power, getting power savers for the computer, turning off the radiators (which shockingly appear to stay on all evening and the whole of Saturday), painting the recycling bins which we are desperately trying to promote. And those are just a few of the ideas we have. But will we make them happen? Whether or not we actually achieve ALL of these goals, surely it’s worth a shot?

Today, I was talking to a boy in my tutor group. He had turned on the radiator AND opened the window.  

“Why?” I asked him. Why wouldn’t a boy, who has a perfectly functioning brain, make the connection?  

He answered “I don’t care.”  

“What?!” I exclaimed “How can you not care when you are obviously wasting our resources? You will die and leave this ruined world for the rest of humanity, and then your children will die because of your selfishness, and because of you ‘not caring’!”

He simply shrugged his shoulders and repeated “I don’t care. They’re gonna die anyway. I’m gonna die anyway.”

So the many people who have this attitude clearly don’t understand. But if we, as students, can educate our peers, as well as achieve our practical targets of saving resources, and we are just students, then that surely proves that a lot can be done.

 If we’re not lazy, we don’t pass the responsibility onto someone else, and really strive to make a change, perhaps, finally, our generation will stop wasting.