Another win for a pair of Grade 7 students from Anderdon Public School in Amherstburg.
Thanks to Darragh Aston and Addisyn Walker, the Greater Essex County District School Board is going to begin the process of eliminating single-use plastics and plastic straws, board wide.
Jodi Nolin is the eco-teacher at Anderdon and says Aston and Walker have been instrumental in making a long list of environmentally minded changes at the school.
She says the girls helped reduce plastic bottle use at the school by 99%.
"Carrying out studies, looking at statistics, how many plastic water bottles are in the school? And then we had a ban the plastic water bottle campaign, which was very successful," says Nolin. "When we surveyed them after our campaign, 99% of our students were using reusable bottles from home."
She says the pair have also changed the way students pack their lunches.
"We run a litter-less lunch campaign and a boomerang lunch campaign, where we're encouraging any garbage that comes to school to go back home so that families can see the daily garbage they're producing and the weekly garbage they're producing," says Nolin. "Hopefully it'll motivate people to switch to reusable containers and litter-less lunches."
She hopes this is the first step of many other green initiatives by the school board.
"Everything that we do at school, we're trying to have an environmental perspective interwoven into it," according to Nolin. "The board encourages us to be as environmentally friendly as possible, but then there's still things being done at the board level that maybe aren't the most environmentally friendly. So the girls said we learn about it, we talk about it, we do a lot at school, what more can we do?"
Nolin adds Anderdon has been recognized by the province as a platinum eco-school for the past two years.
Aston and Walker made a presentation to the school board Tuesday night — this comes one month after the girls convinced Amherstburg Council to carry out the same ban at the Libro Centre.