Environmental Innovation for All of Us

We will be emphasising environmental solutions this term and hope you will join us in changing our collective habits in this regard. With two years and eight months, exactly, until day zero (when we will cease to contribute to the dump entirely) there is a lot we can each do immediately. This term we have focused on two practical ways that everyone from three years and older can participate in.

One
We want to generate and plant 16000 spek plants. We are going to need your help. Break pieces off the plants we have, take them home and grow them. When we are planting, we would like you to bring your spek plants to school and we will cover banks and waste spaces with living plants that clean the air and become the lungs of the College.

Plants use and produce both Oxygen and Carbon dioxide. The best plants produce a lot more oxygen than CO2. Oxygen ‘oxidies’ Carbon Monoxide fumes and turns it into Carbon Dioxide which is useable by plants which use the carbon to photosynthesise. Spek plants or Pigs Ear are superior when it comes to cleaning air and we should think of planting them in road islands in our suburbs – but we will start at
St Charles College.

Two
We challenge everyone to start an EcoBrick per family member. I have one at work and one at home. It is a great way to stop plastic going into the ocean, blocking drains and monitoring your own plastic footprint.

What if the starting point for all South Africa is to love your city. We can start a lovePietermaritzburg movement, following the Howick example, finding solutions that make life better for the people who live here. We’ll need people who can take the complicated out of it and help people to learn new and easy ways to change the way we use the space we live in. Influencing such a shift is an outrageously difficult challenge, but accepting the alternative is not really a version of the future I would like to live in. As suggested by those who sent in comments to our previous article on ‘environmental future-thinking’, we need to harness the school network to influence families to think in new ways and redesign the way we use and care for our city.

– Mr Allen Van Blerk (Principal)