IF you recycle today, it’s simply for a better tomorrow and what better way to teach about recycling than by educating individuals who will be leaders of tomorrow.

The Pacific Recycling Foundation has opened up great opportunities for young people in schools to learn about recycling and advocate for the green movement.

After making an impact with its Recycling on the Go (ROG) program at Jai Narayan College last year, the foundation is now hopeful of a positive journey with two additional schools.

The ROG program will now be scaled up with two schools – one being an all-girls school and the other a primary school.

This was highlighted by the Pacific Recycling Foundation founder and Waste Recyclers Fiji Ltd chief executive officer, Amitesh Deo last week.

The foundation’s first ROG school program with 24 Jai Narayan College ambassadors has had an impactful effect in terms of changing behaviours towards recycling or waste management.

“The work that we do with the ROG program is training 24 students from Jai Narayan College to become recycling advocates,” Mr Deo said. “They changed behaviours of 900 other students and their teachers.”

“We understand that changing behaviour and mindset is something that will not happen tomorrow, so it actually needs a group of like-minded individuals who want to push the idea forward. That is what the project is all about.

“The project is about these students who have received training on different things, not just on how to put plastic or recyclables in a bin but about issues like corporate push facts, corporate bullying, gender in waste management, the lives of informal waste pickers and about gimmicks of recycling because it’s not just black and white.

“Our program is on how to address those and what we have seen is that these programs, if effectively done, do have an impact in society.

“In Jai Narayan College we have seen an impact. We have seen a lot of participation now in recycling and there are a lot of discussions about it.

“There has even been behaviour change noted with teachers who never used to think of recycling as a key element in their daily lives. They are now seeing recycling as something completely different.”

He said for the foundation that was basically movement building – those 24 students were able to impact 900 students, their teachers and school management to positively engage in a recycling project.

He said that was one of the reasons why the foundation wanted more of the programs to be implemented. Even with such an effective program as ROG, there were also certain issues the ambassadors faced that needed to be highlighted.

One of the issues was name-calling.

“In Jai Narayan College, we have also had elements of name calling and all of that was attached with stigma in waste picking,” he said.

“Since the words like rubbish and waste are involved, there have been incidents of name calling.

“We weren’t expecting that to happen in a school setting because the ambassadors were given badges, et cetera, but still there were incidents as such.”

“We had to respond quickly because when it started to happen, it happened to the female ambassadors.

“They were picked on and called mother of rubbish, et cetera.”

“We were mindful because we didn’t want this to impact their studies, so we quickly had discussions.”

“It is always going to be a student-led program for us.”

“So the ownership of the program was with the students.”

“Once a problem is identified, we get together and we say okay this is the problem, we can guide you in finding the solutions, and you must also agree that this is the solution.”

“They all agreed that they wanted to hear messages from motivational speakers or leaders on this. We brought in speakers such as government ministers to give them encouragement, saying that despite all the push facts, that is what leadership is all about as well.”

“You will not be having it good all the time, there will be days when someone will pick on you or call you names, that message needed to be addressed to the students.

“When we started talking about it, in the sense of empowerment that yes it’s okay – that we are doing something different then the students realise the work that they were doing is so much more important than the name calling that was associated with it.”

He said the students stood up for themselves after that.

“The element of bullying can be quite heavy at schools, but it was remedied through the student’s own intervention. Their suggestion to get leaders to talk to them on how to take the message forward,” he said.

With those in mind the foundation now hopes to look at how different it would be at an all-girls school or at a primary school.

“We would like to see whether tapping into a younger mind would make any difference whether we are able to get the training faster, message faster and look at our key
learning. “Attached with that is our long term vision of making sure we have enough lessons learned, enough data where we can go up to the Government and we can say
this is the best practice.

“Now how do we progressively implement this throughout Fiji in different schools and communities.”

He said it was important for younger generations to participate in the programs.