The Cecele Browne Integrated School on Nevis won the recycling competition held under the auspices of the St. Kitts and Nevis Solid Waste Management and Recycling Project. The announcement was made at the Awards Ceremony of the competition at Cuna Conference Center in Fortlands on Thursday attended by students and teachers of some of the 33 schools across the Federation that participated in the competition, which ran for several weeks. The competition was administered by the Taiwan Technical Mission in collaboration with Ministry of Environment. Under the competition, the students were required to gather as many plastic bottles as possible, which were collected each week, weighed and tabulated. The winners were determined by the average pounds of plastic collected per student.
The winning school collected 582.46 pounds of plastic. With a student population of 26, each student would have collected an average of 22.40 pounds. In second place was another Nevis school the Violent O Jeffers Nicolls Primary School, that collected 1156.48 pounds of plastic, an average of 17.26 pounds per student of their student population of 67. Third place went to the St. Kitts Seventh Day Adventist Primary School had collected 3564.94 pounds of plastic, an average of 12.51 pounds per student of their 285-student population. With that result, the Seventh Day Adventist School collected the most bottles in pounds on St. Kitts and the Charlestown Primary School, with 1519.01 pounds topping the schools on Nevis. A total of 16650.64 pounds of plastic bottles were collected by all the participating schools. That’s an average of just over 3.27 pounds of plastic bottles collected by each student.
Taiwan Ambassador His Excellency Michael Lin said he is excited in seeing the enthusiasm among the children who participated in the competition, as it has been an educational experience.
Meanwhile, Environment Minster Dr. Joyelle Clarke stressed that making St. Kitts and Nevis a sustainable island state, will only happen with the participation of the nation’s students. Also in attendance at the award ceremony were other officials from the Taiwanese Embassy and the Taiwan Technical Mission staff, representative of the Solid Waste Management agencies of both islands, officials from the Ministry of Environment and officials from the Federal and Nevis Ministries of Education.
