WOW 2009 second place goes to:
Smithycroft Secondary School
Students:
Katie,
Ashley, David and Jason
Teacher:
Linda Mc Cusker
WOW idea:
What a Load of Rubbish
2,800,000 pieces of disposable dinnerware are
thrown away by our school every school year most of which is made out of
polystyrene. This is not an environmentally friendly material which is why
we offer an alternative. We found a material called melamine which can be
used to make dinnerware and can be re-used again and again. If this was
used in schools then it would cut down the schools waste massively. Our
project’s aim is to make our school and every other school in Britain more
environmentally friendly.
The Fuel Zone which is our school cafeteria
currently uses disposable containers which cannot be recycled, but we have
proven that the Fuel Zone should use reusable dinnerware which is better
for the environment and also saves them money in the long run. We
calculated that around 500 people use the Fuel Zone each day in our school
which uses 2,800,000 pieces of disposable dinnerware.
We researched the
cost of the disposable dinnerware each year which came to £16500. Then
we calculated the cost of replacing the disposable dinnerware with
melamine dinnerware :
- 1000 place settings
- 2 industrial dishwashers
- 1 year of dishwasher tablets
This came to £8170 therefore the Fuel Zone would get back their investment
in about 6 months. This would cut out this enormous
figure of 2,800,000 pieces of dinnerware which are being thrown into
landfill sites each year, NONE of which gets recycled.