Picking litter, make it shimmer! Keeping the environment clean with St Andrew’s Secondary School
Written by Wong Wai Cheng
With 2024 designated as the Year of Public Hygiene, Go Green SG 2024 has seen numerous activities rallying the community in four key focus areas – Clean Environment, Clean Air, Clean Water, and Safe Food. Maintaining and raising the standards of public hygiene is a collective responsibility and everyone can play a part.
St Andrew’s Secondary School (SASS) was one of the Go Green SG partners doing just that, organising a litter picking activity in the Potong Pasir neighbourhood for its students.
Graced by Senior Parliamentary Secretary (SPS) Baey Yam Keng, the afternoon began with student presentations on recent Project E.C.O. (Educate. Challenge. Organise.) SASS had initiated earlier this year. Project E.C.O. are student-led projects organised by primary and secondary schools in support of Clean and Green Singapore. Students can launch recycling initiatives, conduct studies, hold collection drives for recyclables to raise awareness of environmental sustainability among their peers and the community.
For example, one of the projects, by SASS’ green class representatives – otherwise known as Green Envoys, embarked on an investigative study on the cleanliness of their school’s toilets, and how to improve the state of public hygiene in them. These Green Envoys conducted interviews with school cleaners and their peers to determine areas of improvement.
After that, SPS Baey, the students, and teachers made their way to the Potong Pasir neighbourhood. The students were quick to find small pieces of plastic wrappers on the grass patches adjacent to the pavements along the way. Utilising trusty ‘trash busters’ equipment and the Stridy App logbook, the students picked up various types of trash and recorded their quantities. These included plastic food wrappers, used tissue papers, and beer bottle caps. The most common item was cigarette butts , which were found more prevalently next to rubbish bins.
After almost an hour of litter picking, everyone headed to Potong Pasir Community Club to regroup and tally up how much trash was collected. Using a portable weighing scale, the weight of all the trash bags amounted to eight kilograms!
The students shared that the litter picking experience provided valuable insights. Student of class 3 Thanksgiving Khoh Yong How said the activity gave him a strong sense of accomplishment and he learnt the importance of being responsible for maintaining the environment’s cleanliness.
Students also employed some critical thinking skills during the activity, as they analysed the various types of trash found, where they congregated, and possible reasons as to how they got there. In fact, this litter-picking activity is not a one-time event for St Andrew’s Secondary School, with students picking litter in the community on a weekly, rotating basis.
Another way the school advocates for a clean environment is through Project E.C.O.. Jitheshwaran from Class 3 Empathy shared that his team is gearing up to launch Community Problem Solving, an initiative that aims to explore various issues around the neighbourhood and thereafter ideate solutions to bring about positive change to the environment.
The whole-school approach adopted by the teachers and school leaders at St Andrew’s Secondary School provides students with opportunities to be engaged in sustainability-related initiatives on a regular basis. Other than litter-picking sessions, the school embodies sustainability in various ways, like having blue bins in each classroom, having student-led presentations on the Clean Toilets Campaign, and through tying up with alumni members such as urban farmer Christopher Leow, and external partners such as SembWaste.
In the community and public spaces, everyone can play their part to positively impact the community and maintain good public hygiene. To find out more about nationwide efforts for public hygiene, check out this page!