AWE celebrates World Environment Day

The future’s looking sustainable, thanks to the bright ideas of local Key Stage 3 students working with AWE graduates to mark World Environment Day on 5 June.

Teams from six schools (Hurst Community College, Brighton Hill School, Park House School, Kennet School, Dove House School and Willink School gathered at the Hurst in Tadley to design, build and present some exciting local sustainability solutions. The overall winners were a team from Kennet School, with their innovative ‘iRecycle’ app. The smartphone app locates general and recycle bins in the area and incorporates a pointscoring leaderboard system for the amount of waste recycled Luke Joyner, part of the AWE graduate team which organised the event, said:

“A big thank you to all the students who took part, their teachers, our judges and our guest speaker, University of Reading PhD Student, Louise Arnal. “Myself and the other graduates in the team were all equally overwhelmed by the effort and creativity each team had put into their innovations for the competition, and as close as the contest was, the iRecycle app was a worthy winner. It was incredible to see how engaged and eager to participate the students were throughout each aspect of the event, reflected in all of the positive feedback we received afterwards.’

“The idea of this collaborative competition is to build environmental awareness on issues around climate change. There are lots of different topics that feed into the concept of sustainability and the environment – energy, ecology, heritage, water, air, waste, travel and transport, resource use, renewables, social issues etc. so the students had plenty of scope!”

Image: FANtastic! Designing sustainable energy solutions is a breeze for these young students.