Sustainability Team

By: B. Carneiro

      This year at St. Paul's a new enrichment came to place: The Sustainability Team. Formed by Pauleans deeply interested and concerned with current environmental issues our planet is facing, the Sustainability Team came together in order to promote “green” thinking across the school and to ensure the school maintains its progress in becoming more environmentally friendly as it has successfully done over the last few years. Interestingly, we decided to challenge ourselves to go beyond and truly attempt not to only to make a sustainable impact inside St. Paul's, but across our community in São Paulo. 

    How do we plan on doing all of this? Luckily, the Sustainability team has a very dedicated and passionate group of pupils. Firstly, we have a group of four students focusing on developing a sustainability charter for the school, in which we will gather data from previous years on things such as the schools food waste and record how the school has improved over the last two years, so we can keep track of the schools sustainable progress and analyse what strategies have worked so we can continue to implement them in the school. Secondly, we have a group in charge of spreading sustainable thinking and environmentally friendly messages across the school, in the form of emails with an inspirational video or encouraging posters. We are also getting involved in a project to design recycling initiatives across São Paulo which will then be presented to the current mayor. During our meetings, we also discuss ways in which we can help the school reduce its environmental impact, such as ways to reduce plastics. Finally, we are planning this years Green Week, and aim on making it interesting for every pupil by ensuring everyone gets involved. 

    In a nutshell, the Sustainability Team was created as a way to make students aware of such current, pressing issues to do with our environment and to encourage and remind all students to act as much as they can in order to live a more sustainable life. We aim to make St. Paul's as “green” as we possibly can, as we increasingly see how urgent of a matter environmental issues have become throughout the years, and realize how fast we have to act .