Solid Waste Management was the first CAS activity I undertook, and one of the most challenging. We performed SWM as a group, the seven of us who were in the first IB year of school. It was one of the first times we really had to learn how to work as a group.
We began SWM by cleaning the school fields. In one of our first sessions, we walked around the field, picking up rubbish. Afterwards, we began the huge process of raking and segregating plastics from a giant pile of rubbish that had been dumped at the back of our school. Each Saturday, when we had SWM, we carried buckets, rakes and shovels to the back of the field. It was tough work, especially in the hot sun, and involved a lot of effort from all of us.
The aim was to make manure from the decomposition of leaves that had piled up in a corner of the field, as well as make our school a more environmentally friendly, clean place. We were successful in our goal; by the end, we’d managed to make a lot of manure and sell it, the money contributing to our CAS savings which would later be donated to charity. We also gained the technical knowledge of the process. More than actually making the manure and doing SWM, all the hard work we put into it made me much more conscious of my surroundings. We spent painstaking hours picking up plastics and raking leaves, surrounded by bugs. The bugs by themselves were hard to get used to, yet we were persistent, and didn’t give up.
This was our first activity working as a group, when we had yet to get to know each other well. Working as a group became an integral part of the task. I feel we were able to raise each other’s motivation levels, and the overall sense of team spirit, quite well. We learned how to split tasks and work more efficiently; one of us would rake, whilst two would be in charge of collecting the leaves and putting them in the bins and someone else might be in charge of collecting water. This way, we became a lot more sensitive to each other’s needs, by understanding when others might need a break, or when someone was too tired to do a certain task.
The biggest difficulty we faced as the immensity of our task. There were only seven of us, yet the pile of rubbish seemed to be endlessly large. At times, it felt like our task was too big, and it wasn’t going anywhere; but once we’d finished a day’s work, and realised just how much we had accomplished, we all felt our work was worthwhile.
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