The youth are viewed as idle individuals who do nothing but rant on social media. Contrariwise, many of the young minds in the Philippines, especially here in Cebu, are very willing and thrilled to participate in efforts and movements for sustainable development. However, the lack of connections and information about these movements hinder the youth to act. Being an Eco-gen Ambassador, I know that I can somehow bridge this gap. This is the reason why I wanted to become one, in the first place. I want to connect the youth and forge them to become part of the movement for sustainable development.

Part of my plans for the first month of my assignment as an Ambassador is to gather active youth, orient them on current environmental issues and give them information about Tunza Eco-generation platform. Thus, I initiated a meeting with the students in our school and discussed how we can spread the idea of sustainability to our colleagues. We identified the points that would complement with Tunza’s objectives. Together we identified our short-term and long-term plan to strengthen the number of youth who desire to contribute and become Eco-vanguards.

As stated in my previous report, paper waste is becoming a problem here in our region. Most of the solid wastes seen in offices, particularly in universities and colleges, are papers. 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. With this in mind, our team decided to initiate a project that would become a catalyst in solving this problem, and this project is Project NOWTBUKS (NOW is the Time to Build Up Kids for Sustainability).

At the end of the meeting, we unanimously agreed to do Project NOWBTUKS Activities (which I will explain more in the next reports) for the next months. Every member was given a task in order to organize the “to-do list” and speed-up the progress of the pre-implementation activities. We also agreed to have progress reports/meeting in order to regularly track development.