Grade 8 Students just found out how their school, UWC East, does their part in helping the future generations by creating a sustainable environment for thousands of students to use and sustain at a unique grade 8 assembly.
In a dark hall, a bright and jolly man named Simon Thomas caused all the peacefully seated students to stare at the presentation in awe, with a look of surprise on their faces like when your parents give you the perfect birthday present, the one you always longed for. The same exact face, but instead learning about how the school is what it is today and what it does to do their part in protecting the precious resources of the dying planet that we live on today.
Who would have conceptualized the fact that a school could have a huge difference in Singapore’s sustainability in ways such as the orientation of the building, how the building is designed to do different things like ventilate itself and save water and electricity, how they infiltrate the water they get from rainfall into their plan of preserving the resources? Who would have thought that they spend an average of $160,000 dollars per month on electricity and each month they are doing their best to cut down on it and use the money to educate the students better?
The orientation of the building is set up in such a way that each classroom shaded each other from the hot and tropical sun of Singapore, that way, the school would have to buy blinds and curtains. Of course there is a quality amount of sunlight which enters the room, so to minimize the amount power used by the school for the lighting the school installed automatic dimmers in the lights so it uses only the proper amount of light which is required to light the room.
A classroom in the school ahs fans but why would it have fans when 40% of the $160,000 of the school’s is used to power the air conditioners? These fans are actually built to ventilate the hallways because they aren’t air conditioned. Soon, this cool air will enter the toilets, give out the fresh cool air to the plants in the toilet and is later let out from the open windows. And this process occurs a lot of times because the doors to enter the toilet is opened a lot.
UWC doesn’t just save electricity like that though. Whenever it rains, half of the enormous football field collects the rainwater, which is soon to be filtered and in no matter of time, it will be used to water the plants in the garden and the green grass on the premises of the school. So, instead of using the scarce amount of freshwater in Singapore, UWC uses reuses the rainwater so that they can save a lot of water for the people of Singapore.
How sustainable is this school? How many schools in the world do this? I don’t think the significance of the drastic measures this school takes has been emphasized before. Just imagine if a few schools in every country or state do this. There will be an colossal amount of resources that those schools will save. Imagine the number of resources the world will save for the safety of the future generations. Sure it’ll cost a lot of money, resources and time. But don’t you think it’ll be worth it. According to Mr. Raisdana, if many schools in the world will have a sustainable philosophy, it not only will impact the school but the students itself. The students will soon grow into adults and go into different businesses like law and banking and then soon, these adults will hopefully pass it on to the next generations and soon there will be another sustainable way to help the earth.
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