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2009/2010 CCLC Member Marissa
MARISSA, 13, Alberta
| Challenge for 2009/10: ECO CHALLENGE Every month Marissa had to do variou eco-friendly challenges like recycling, water conservation, no idling, and more... see below! |
| Meet Marissa from Alberta. About me: I am really outgoing and love to play sports. My favorite sport is ringette. I am part of a great Ringette club and have made many new friends. If you don’t know what ringette is, it’s a sport similar to hockey where you use a stick with no blade and a rubber ring. My passion in life is music, I play the flute and piano. I have played piano since I was 6 or 7 and now next year I will be teaching others how to play. I have composed a piece of music that I’m entering in a contest next year as well. What I love about GCDA: The thing I love about GDCA is how it shows the many things girls my age have done to change the world. I also enjoy reading about what guys my age think and I like to read the stories that come from other girls. Why I wanted to be on the CCLC: I wanted to join the CCLC because I want to gain leadership skills and become more responsible in handing in my assignments. I hope this helps me in the long run become a better person. I also wish to influence the people who read GCDA to change our world by following some of the tips I provide from the ECO challenge I chose. Fave saying: “Around here…we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths”~ Walt Disney. |
My challenge is the ECO Challenge! SCROLL DOWN TO READ MY MONTHLY RESULTS... FINAL SUMMARY OF MY CHALLENGE! Well this is my last summary of my time on the CCLC :( . I really enjoyed doing the challenges and asking poll questions. I really enjoyed doing the idle-free challenge because my family was supporting me on it and I learned so many cool facts about what an impact it has on our environment. I had a harder time on the being water wise challenge because I found I couldn't find much creative ways to be better conscious of it. This time period on the CCLC team has showed me new ways to be eco friendly. I think I'm going to try my best to continue all the challenges I did and I will definitely be able to continue having a litterless lunch for my school life. I really think that with the awesome support from my family I was able to make a bit of an impact on the way we are acting towards the environment. When I was doing some of my challenges I sometimes found it harder to get some support from my friends because they are all so busy and couldn't put much effort into the challenges. I would definitely do something like this again and I hope to continue being part of leadership comittees throughout my life. I really felt I had a responsible role by being on the CCLC and I think it will help me with my future career life as well. RESULTS FOR APRIL 2010: BE WATER WISE... Do things that concerve water, come up with ideas to do with bathroom showering/flushing/washing, kitchen use and others. This month I was challenged to be water wise. My family and I took care in doing things like keeping the water off when brushing your teeth and doing a leaky toilet test once a month. I also made sure I was taking less than ten minute showers by timing myself or just watching the clock. You could have races for who can have the shortest and cleanest shower. Another thing we do all the time is have water from our water filter. This saves you from running the tap for cold water. You could fill up a pitcher of water and place it in the fridge so you can have cold water on demand! I had alot fun this month being water wise and I hope you can start doing these things in your own home!! RESULTS FOR MARCH 2010: REUSE... Try to reuse as much as possible. This month was actually one of the easier months challenge wise. My job was to try and reuse stuff as much as I can. My family and I already reuse as much stuff as we can. We like to take paper that has writing on one side and is blank on the other, and use it as rough drafts for school and stuff. I also reuse the big Ziploc bags. All you have to do is just wash them out and then use them again! Another thing I did this month was took all my old clothes that don’t fit and gave them away instead of throwing them out. My parents usually take their old T-shirts and rip them up and use them as rags and stuff like that. Finally we went and got some reusable bags to use at grocery stores to stop using the plastic bags that you usually get. I really enjoyed being in this challenge and I hope you can take these ideas into your own life! RESULTS FOR FEBRUARY 2010: LITTERLESS LUNCHES Choose to do this with a group of friends/families, your whole class or the whole school if you can get the support (encourage family members to do the same at work)! On the first day, have people bring their lunches how they usually do and record or take a photo of how much litter is involved (this includes recyclables like napkins and bottles and so on). Suggest ways to reduce litter such as replacing reusable containers in place of foil, plastic wrap and plastic lunch bags, or reusable drink containers in place of juice boxes or bottles. Suggest a reusable box or bag in place of paper or plastic lunch bags. Let others make new suggestions. Suggest also that food products with individual packaging be avoided and instead choose foods and snacks with less packaging (for example take chips from a large bag into a reusable container rather than bringing individual sized bags every day). Notice the amount of litter on a daily basis and set goals to minimize the amount. Support and encourage each other to stick with it. This month I had to make litterless lunchs for a whole month. This wasn’t super hard because I do try to do this anyways all the time. My Mom and I used lots of reusable containers instead of plastic bags. Another thing I think is better for our planet is instead of buying those pre-packages cheese and crackers and the carrots and dip; I get them separately in bigger quantities and then put them in containers for lunch. Since I was little I would use those drinking no leak containers for juice instead of buying juice boxes. We would get a big container of juice and use our reusable drink containers instead. A great thing that my school has started has really helped out in my challenge this month. Our grade 8 Envoe (environmental outdoor education) class created something called “trashless” Tuesdays. Every Tuesday everyone in our school would try to refrain from throwing out anything in the garbage. It has been going really good so far! We have been throwing our less and less garbage every week. I have so many great things that I did including what’s above. I would also stick to buying things big instead of tiny packages to keep from wasting so much garbage. This challenge was really successful and I quite enjoyed it! RESULTS FOR JANUARY 2010: NO IDLE ZONE... With the help of your teacher/principal, see how you can encourage parents to not idle their cars when picking and dropping off their kids for school. If they are waiting for 2 minutes or more, they have to turn off their engines. Suggest that parents do this wherever they are, not just at school. Think of ways you can help enforce this at other places people idle like grocery stores, community centers, etc. Maybe you could hang posters “Be Kind To The Environment, Please Don’t Idle”. Be sure to have a parent help you out with this and be sure you or your friends/classmates don’t go up to strangers or strange cars! Write a brief summary at the end of the month about how your challenge worked out. This month I was set to do a No Idling challenge. I decided to challenge my family and friends to keep from polluting the air by having their vehicles not be left running for more than 5 minutes. Right now where I live it's really snowy and cold so this was quite a challenge! Usually when I leave for ringette practice my parents start the car a while before we leave, but now I have been way more conscious of how idling vehicles can make such a mark on your environmental footprint. I did some research and learned that the best way to warm up your car is to drive it! A good thing you could try with your family or do yourself is to remind them of this and start a reward system. If one of your parents leaves the car running for longer you could charge 25 cents, but make sure they agree to this plan as well. Another thing my family does is if you're in a really big car line-up you can just turn your engine off for a little bit because just sitting there with it running is a huge impact. A big fact I found was that if you’re waiting in a drive-through lineup and there are 5 or 6 other cars in front of you, it wastes money too! An average engine burns 3.5 L of fuel/hour so if you sit there idling your car for 10 minutes you just wasted about 50 cents which could’ve gone towards that nice coffee or doughnut you’re going to get, with the cost of gas being around 87 cents per litre. Idling is a really big issue and is causing lots and lots of pollution! So talk to your friends or family about the impact of it and how you can make a difference! RESULTS FOR DECEMBER 2009: SAVE A TREE... Holiday season is among us and a lot of environmental waste happens at this ‘gift-giving’ time of year. This month, get as many people/families to send their holiday greeting electronically! Use family photos to create your own digital cards and greetings and tell them you are doing so in your efforts to save a tree. Consider also gift wrap: what are some creative ways you can wrap gifts without using paper that just gets one use before it is thrown out? Brainstorm with the people supporting you on this challenge and at the end of the month write out a description of the ways you all “saved a tree”! This month I had to be eco friendly when sending Christmas cards or wrapping presents. For me, my mom came up with this great idea of creating a website/ blog that had a couple paragraphs of our family’s year so far and held pictures of our adventures. To do this you can create private websites that you can give people permission to see so that only family or friends can look at it. This was a great idea to refrain from sending cards and using so much paper in the process. Some other great ideas that my friends had, was to send e-cards. I found this awesome little program called Smilebox. In the program you can create many different cards to send to people through email and as a bonus you can add your own great pictures. One of the participants of my challenge said she used either newspaper or recycled wrapping paper for wrapping her presents. For present wrapping you can re-use bags and tissue paper or be creative and find a new way yourself! This month we had a quite effortless time saving tree’s during the holiday season. RESULTS FOR NOVEMBER 2009: CONSCIOUS SHOPPING With groceries and many other products, a lot of unnecessary packaging is often used. This month my challenge is to become a conscious shopper. Have participants keep track of ways they said no to excessive packaging and what they did instead. This month I participated in the Eco Challenge where I had to be a conscious shopper by doing things like reducing packaging in my purchases. I learned a lot of new ways to save and use less harmful packaging when grocery shopping with my mom. One thing you can do is instead of buying small sizes of things like shampoo and crackers is to buy the bigger, bulk version of the item because it uses less packaging and is usually cheaper. This is a great way to save money in the long term and reduce the garbage used in packaging these items. Another thing that is good is to use bins or reusable bags when shopping, or if you use the plastic bags you can reuse them as garbage bags in your home or as lunch kits. One big thing I think is a great idea is instead of buying pre-made pancakes and frozen breakfasts is to make them before by hand and double the batch so you can freeze them and this lasts a long time too. When going to retail stores many of them have started selling reusable bags. So if your favorite store is selling them it’s a great idea to get one or two because it will help out our environment. This challenge seemed to be easier for all participants including me because many stores sell items in bulk size which saves the environment and your money. We have learned a lot of new ways to be more conscious when shopping and I hope you can take these ideas and use them on your next shopping trip! |
Comment
I am from Alberta too! Yay for AlbertanS!
haha i realized i recognized you from my best friends ringette team
keep up the great work!
This is so great.
Not bad thing-a-ma-bob marissa!Luv ya
Piano is the best!! I have been playing for 5 years
Hey great job girl! Keep it up!
I think it is awesome what you're doing with the CCLC! I love how much you care about the environment :o)
You're so awesome and so young to be a piano teacher! Good luck with the Eco Challenge <3
Hey rock on Ur bff, Chatter-box