Patrician Academy teacher Regina Glynn and Ms Walsh with Global Citizenship students Kieran Duggan, Robbie O’Brien, Leon Baja, Harry Bull and Patrick O’Grady and their upcycled projects.
The Global Citizenship Education students in the Patrician Academy have a main goal this year, which is to create awareness around the topic of waste – what waste is, how much waste we are creating in our school, and how we can work together to reduce waste. In order to do this, we have taken on a number of different projects: one of our main projects before we went into lockdown was to enter the competition ‘Up Cycling’ which was run by MyWaste.ie
MyWaste.ie and the Environmental Protection Agency set a challenge this year to ‘unearth the imagination within and create something new out of something old’. The TY Global Citizenship group decided to save some old unwanted items, destined for the landfill, by upcycling them. The students had to document their journey, including taking photographs of before and after the transformation.
Calvin Cairns and Darragh Nolan turned a used children’s hula hoop and some unwanted old t-shirts into a decorative wall hanging. Kieran Duggan and Conor Brennan transformed some used car tyres into colourful planters which are now brightening the entrance to our school. Harry Bull repaired and revamped a tired-looking deckchair from his shed at home. Paul Griffin and Leon Baja, with the help of the rest of the class, turned some unwanted plastic blue barrels into colourful recycling bins to be used in our school.
During the course of the project we learned lots of different skills: Patrick O’Grady and Robbie O’Brien completely changed the look of a small chest of drawers, again found at the local dump, and made it suitable for a little girl’s room. They had to research, plan and design an image suitable for a children’s bedroom locker. They also learned how to sand, how to under-coat, paint and varnish the finished product. Aristjon Mirashi and Richard Svaza rescued an unwanted old stool from the local dump, painted it and reupholstered it.
As part of the research, we learned all about Mallow’s local recycling centre and how it works. We learned what can be recycled, how they are sorted, what happens to the different items and how different items can be reused. Using this information we strive to create a zero -waste lifestyle