School’s fabric money wallet project nominated for green award – Sarah Mallia
06 February, 2023
De La Salle College Junior School is once again participating in the European Week for Waste Reduction campaign. The school has already been nominated for this award three times and won it last year with the project titled ‘Communities for Change’.
This year, we have become more aware of how many paper envelopes are used, and later thrown away, every time we collect money for donations, outings and such activities. The educators try their best to reuse such resources but, most of the time, this is not possible. As a school, we are thus making an effort to reduce this paper waste.
As an initiative, the Ekoskola members, together with the educators and the senior leadership team members, discussed this issue and came up with the idea of transforming fabric materials into wallets for all junior school pupils to use instead of paper envelopes. The fabric wallets have the benefit of being able to be reused and washed numerous times, giving them a longer lifetime than that of a paper envelope.
We started off by sending an e-mail to all parents/guardians to launch the project and we also asked for used clothes, extra fabric materials and thread that they intended to throw away.
There was a huge response from the pupils’ families and relatives, and we received bag loads of materials, enough to get the work started. The next step was to ask for helpers to volunteer to sew the wallets. Once again, a lot of parents, guardians, aunts and grandmothers showed interest in coming together to work on this project. Two retired educators – Rita Vella and Carmen Caruana – volunteered to managed the next steps of putting together the fabric wallets and preparing a bag for each volunteer consisting of a pattern, a sample with instructions, velcro, fabric and thread.
Once the team of volunteers was put together, they held several meetings at school where they got to know each other, understood the process and the steps to make the wallet, and clarified any difficulties along the way. Finally, Ms Rita and Ms Carmen ironed a name tag on each wallet so that students could label their personal wallet.
While this work was being done, the Ekoskola members prepared various video clips that were uploaded online to explain the project to the Lasallian community and also to raise awareness on textiles and the benefits of the fabric wallets.
At the beginning of the second term, the Ekoskola members went around all the classrooms in the junior school to explain the idea behind the fabric wallets and distribute them to each Lasallian student.
A final e-mail was sent to all those involved to thank them for their hard work and also to show appreciation for their contributions in this project.
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Source: timesofmalta.com