Building the Greener Generation – ZeroWaste Goes to School

In January 2024, we started the ZeroWaste Center Goes to School (Z-GTS) program in two schools, SMP 3 Kuta Selatan and SD 3 Benoa. If the previous year we only focused on visiting elementary schools, this year we started to move up to visit middle schools with the aim of raising awareness of the dangers of waste. From the Z-GTS events in the two schools, we managed to educate a total of 703 students on waste management and composting. We believe that this event can make a big impact on today’s youth on environmental protection against waste. Our target is clearly to increase the number of schools and students we visit and educate so that they are able to understand that it is us who can save the environment.

For the first time, we held Z-GTS for middle school students and SMP 3 Kuta Selatan was the first junior high school we visited with this event. There were around 450 students who gathered at the school’s main field to gain knowledge about waste management and composting. We found it a little difficult to build a conducive and attractive learning atmosphere because they are at an unruly age but after a while, they began to interact enthusiastically with us. In this event, we provided knowledge about the dangers of waste and types of plastic waste with a combination of game methods to make them interested in participating and learning with fun techniques. Then, they were given a workshop on how to make compost correctly using simple tools and materials.

For SD 3 Benoa, this was the second time we held Z-GTS to educate students who had not been able to join us during our first visit to the school. An interesting thing happened when the school speaker suddenly broke down so I had to use a manual speaker. There were about 250 students who were successfully educated about waste management and composting. From the beginning of the event to the end, they were very orderly and eager to keep answering questions from us. In addition to the students, there were some teachers who participated in listening to our socialization carefully while supervising the students. 

At the end of the event, we will ask two students to summarize what they learned from this activity. Then we give some plants to the school as a message to always green the school with plants. Not only plants, we also donated 50 kg of ready-to-use compost that can be used for plants around the school. We always hope that this program can touch more schools and students in the future so that waste management can be better for a healthy environment.