Roslyn+Callaghan

=**St Leonard's Cornish Campus**=

Sustainability Tour
I learned a lot on our tour of St Leonard's. Their school is a lot more sustainable and environmentally friendly than ours. They have a lot of practises in place to keep their school this way. Some of these are: They make huge electricity and money savings every year. Their yearly savings are: Everything they do in class is based on at least one ring of the sustainability rings. The rings are: personal (to do with sustaining beliefs etc), urban/technology (sustainable living/development and use of technology etc), natural (sustaining the natural environment), and socio cultural (sustaining social and cultaral relationships).
 * A vegetable garden: the younger students care for and produce food to learn about growing food and caring for the environment.
 * Natural lighting: in most classrooms, and where possible. When a room is not in use, lights are always off.
 * Different bins: recycling, general, and compost waste.
 * Wind turbine: $20,000
 * Solar pannels
 * Water tanks
 * Thermal chimneys
 * Passive air conditioning: recycled water running over cardboard windows
 * Polystyrene walls
 * Planner paper made out of recycled paper
 * Eco buy book supplies: all their books are orded from an eco friendly company
 * Sustainability centre: $2 million to build
 * Ice cream containers under taps
 * No textbooks: all work through technology rather than books to save paper
 * Native plants
 * Energy: 70GJ
 * Dollars: $2000
 * Green house gases: 5 tonnes
 * Black balloons: 100,000

The school's sustainability motto is: "Sustainabilty is providing enough for all, forever."

Sustainability Centre Tour
What did I learn?
 * I learned that being sustainable is very important to make sure we have a stable and secure future. If you are building a new house, it must be placed in such a way that it utilises the natural surroundings in the best possible way, and the aspects of the house should be placed in the best way too. If you have an existing house you can put energy and water efficient appliances in your house, and use organic and recycled materials for new things you buy. Your garden should have native plants, vegetables, and chickens. A compost heap or worm pile is good too. Basically you should be consious of always trying to make things better for the environment, and the more beneficial a thing is for the environment, the more sustainable it is.

How did this experience help me make connections with my research into sustainability into Japanese schools?
 * Japanese schools are very conscious of sustainability from my experience. They sort their rubbish and all hep out to clean and look after the gardens. When we were at CERES, our tour guide showed us some ways to sort our rubbish, and ways to use it and turn it into a resource. CERES really stresses the importance of gardens and how they make you more environmentally aware and how they can help the world. One of the ways of having less environmental impact was to share things, like washing machines and cleaning materials.

What could we as a school do to be more sustainable in light of what you saw yesterday?
 * Our school really needs to sort out our waste issue. We throw rubbish on the ground, which is harmful to the environment, and when we do throw things in the bin, it all goes in rubbish, and isn't sorted at all. We could start off with recycling bins in every classroom and office, and then start up a compost pile or a worm farm for food scraps. We waste a lot of water in the school, so we could get a water tank or two and flush the toilets with this water. We could also get pipes from the taps in the bathrooms and use this water as greywater to flush the toilets as well. In the canteen we could have more organic foods because they're healthier and better for the environment.

Interview Questions:
How do Japanese schools save electricity? - turn off lights How do Japanese schools save water? - don't let water run How do Japanese schools recycle waste (including paper)? - separate the rubbish How are Japanese schools cleaned? (including grafitti and rubbish removal) - everyone cleans