For years, Sri Lanka has struggled to manage to keep up with the amount of garbage produced by our modern lives. Because of a lack of infrastructure in place to deal with waste, garbage often ends up either in piles on the side of the road, or getting burned. As an organization that really cares about the health of the environment, we wanted to do what we could to help, all the while providing important education and a waste-conscious attitude to our students. This is why we started a bi-yearly tradition of getting a group of students together into separate teams, providing them with large garbage bags. The team that is able to pick up and sort the most amount of garbage, from the road, backyards, and even rivers, wins a fun prize. This not only allowed the students to care for their own natural environment in a way that was entertaining, but was also an opportunity to educate them around waste-management. Once collected, we gave the trash to a government-approved organization that would take it on for further processing. We hope to continue this tradition year by year taking care of the natural world that was entrusted to us, teaching our students to do the same.
