I have chosen Goal 12: “Responsible Consumption by All”. This is a goal aims to reduce food waste by individuals and companies, reduce the generation of waste, and ensure that large companies’ practices are responsible, open and environmentally sound.
I feel that this is an important goal to focus on because we are all guilty of being irresponsible with food waste. I often see children’s lunchboxes being packed away at the end of the day and there is so much unconsumed food that is destined for the bin. I think that it’s important to make them aware of the impact of this kind of waste and to enable them to be more reflective when packing their lunches or when taking one bite out of an apple, etc.
Some of the activities that I would do to promote Goal 12 would include:
– Encouraging recycling in school. Ensure that the bins are correctly labelled and that the children are aware of what exactly should go into each bin.
– Planning for more recycled art projects. Ask the children to bring in egg cartons, milk cartons etc from home and incorporate them into art lessons.
– Conduct waste surveys in class. Look at the wrappers and rubbish left after lunch and encourage the children to reduce this throughout the week by using reusable and recyclable products (lunchboxes instead of ziplock bags etc).
– Look at up recipes for common unfinished foods at home, such as smoothies etc. Show the children how to chop and freeze veg, fruit for smoothies etc to save them being dumped.