As promised, I am posting here an update about Project NOWTBUKS. The volunteers and I have had a busy but truly great months with our activities to support environmental sustainability. May you find the post inspiring.

According to statistics, forests are being cut and trees are being felled at an unimaginable rate of 100 acres per minute to produce paper which is normally used and disposed with no much thought. True enough, most of the solid wastes seen in offices, particularly in universities and colleges, are papers. Moreover, paper accounts for one-fourth of the volume of waste in landfills. When it breaks down in a landfill, it converts to methane, which produces twenty times more greenhouse-gas emissions than carbon dioxide. This mere observation alone gave birth to Project NOWTBUKS (NOW is the Time to Build Up Kids for Sustainability).

Project NOWTBUKS is intended to teach the students their vital role in mitigating the destruction of environment and offer them a simple yet effective way of protecting the environment. This project is composed of activities that are interactive in nature and conducted through group dynamics. The ultimate goal of this project is to deepen the knowledge of the youth about their vital role in protecting the environment. Furthermore, this project also aims to transform young minds to become eco-vanguards, practicing ways of preserving and protecting the environment. The students will be taught how to make eco-notebooks out from scrap materials. Then they will be trained and prepared for their immersion in the community. After a month of training, these young minds will be now be part of the core volunteers of the project and they can already train other participants of Project NOWTBUKS activity.

This project does not only address the need for environment sustainability, it also addresses the need to empower youth. Through participating and volunteering in this project, the youth will be given the chance to express their desire to help and to be part of a meaningful movement. They will be molded to become responsible citizens as well as they will be immersed in various communities. The communities, on the other hand, will be given alternative way of generating additional income. Production of eco-notebooks can be a very simple yet innovative way of selling both an idea and a product.

Another objective of the team is to nurture the creativity of the youth volunteers. They will be given the privilege to propose a new product design that can be made using the scrap materials. These designs will undergo feasibility studies and the most feasible one will be adapted and be integrated in the production. Thru this, volunteers will be challenged to think out of the box.

The team also desires to forge an agreement with the public officials of the region so as to widen the scope of impact of the project. We plan to educate the youth about the project through a school-to-school workshop. This will be done for the whole year.

Since the implementation, the project was able to teach 164 students, mobilized 85 volunteers, made 164 eco-notebooks, recycled 4,920 papers or 49.2 lbs papers and was featured in a Visayas-wide television network.

Project NOWTBUKS has greatly influenced the community, teaching huge number of kids about sustainability in a short span of time and being able to creatively recycle the papers into utilizable notebooks. The fact that the project was requested to be featured in a Visayas-wide TV network affirms the impact it made and how the project is valued by the community. But the greatest accomplishment really of this project is being able to share the idea of sustainability to the young ones. Every time we see the smiles of the kids enjoying and learning from the activity is already an indicator that the project is a success. Those covenants reflect the learning of the participants.