Global Citizenship
We are the Global Citizenship Education students in the Patrician Academy. Our main goal this year 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 the journey they took, including taking photographs of before and after the transformation. Calvin Cairns, 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 that are now brightening the entrance to our school. Harry Bull repaired and revamped a tired looking deck chair 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 doing 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 girls 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 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