Sustainability in Education

We all know how important education is and how expensive the never-ending school supplies can be. I can tell from my own experience that my parents spent hundreds if not thousands on my arts and crafts boxes every single year. The boxes included a variety of stationary that my school deemed necessary for each year ranging from crayons to rulers. The saddest part is that I never got to finish anything, and we were forced to buy everything again at the beginning of the school year again. This made everything more costly and not sustainable at all.

One way of being of sustainable in education is using any kind of stationary till the end. For example, when I started college, I bought myself a set of notebooks and I unfortunately wasn’t able to finish them by the end of the year. Instead of throwing them out and buying new notebooks, I stuck with the ones I had and kept on using them until I was able to finish them. I still haven’t managed to finish them, but they are still in active use.

Another example of sustainability I experienced is about the never-ending stationary boxes I was enforced to purchase. At the end of my elementary school journey, I made sure to find them a good home of someone that I was sure in need of.

One tip regarding this whole issue would be to donate school supplies that you are no longer in need of to people who do. When I was done with elementary, I donated the boxes and the never-ending crayons to my aunt’s school for the mentally retarded and underprivileged. My list of items donated include tons of stationery and toys. You can do the same with your own no longer used items and make a kid’s day simply as that. This allows your stuff to be reused and therefore sustainable since the sources that were out into the manufacturing of the specific item won’t be used again hence making it reusable.

Another tip would be for college and/or high school students. When you get yourself enrolled in a course, we all know how expensive textbooks can be. I personally hated going to the bookstore with my list of hundred-dollar textbooks in hand. One way of making this sustainable for both your wallet and the environment is to buy second hand books. Most colleges allow you to sell your book back to them at a cost and they can resell it for future students. Another way of scoring second hand books is to look at reseller websites. When I was a student in Canada for example, we had a website that had ads from all the students including textbooks that they were no longer in need of. You would simply go on the website and type the name of the book that you are looking for. It would show you all the ads from students that have previously taken the course and were willing to sell it at a fraction of the original price. I know that I have saved at least 500 dollars this way.

One last tip would be using digital channels instead of physical handouts in classes. We all know how technology savvy the current generation is. They are always online and therefore have more technology knowledge than many of the population. When you are in a classroom as a teacher or a student, instead of printing many pages of a class and creating a ton of waste, you can simply download the same document on your laptop and/or tablet to be sustainable in terms of waste.