Recycled drinks bottles become brooms; a sustainable solution for a rural Thai village

July 17, 2012 - PRLog -- Experiential learning is the key objective on all VSP programs (http://vsp.threegeneration.org). Opening children’s minds to the cultural diversities of the world, the geography and the nature, the religions, the foods and the lifestyles of other people on their planet and helping them to realize the choices they make can impact our shared world. Through the great activities offered, interactions in the local society and encouragement to work outside the comfort zone, children leave with a sense of accomplishment and motivation and are often left reflecting on changes they can make in their lives back home. Students leave as more aware Global Citizens.

A recent community service event involving visiting students from United Kingdom’s Harwich and Dovercourt High School here to help build a school in a rural northern Thai village discovered a simple solution to a large environmental problem.

Often during community service activities, VSP students consume quite a lot of fizzy drinks, creating quite a few empty discarded bottles. Trying to reduce the amount of rubbish this created in their host village using a Reduce, Reuse, Recycle approach, the group made nifty brooms from these plastic bottles! This was a great “eco-friendly” project our visiting students and the local Thai kids could work on together - making a difference in their communities.

The Rio+20 Outcome Document, The Future We Want, states: "234. We strongly encourage educational institutions to consider adopting good practices in sustainability management on their campuses and in their communities with the active participation of inter alia students, teachers, and local partners, and teaching sustainable development as an integrated component across disciplines."

At Traihdos Three Generation Community (http://www.threegeneration.org) we are continually embracing these ideas, building sustainability into the Prem International School’s curriculum and our Visiting Schools Program (VSP); working with local experts and learning from local organizations and strategically planning for sustainability in all aspects of the Traidhos operation using the AtKisson Compass Model (http://www.threegeneration.org/sustainability.html) as a thinking tool.