FERGUS – The goal of a recent town hall at Centre Wellington District High School is to make the school carbon neutral by 2030.
“Which is a projection that is at least on all progressive fronts where we should be attempting to go for all the right reasons,” said Chris Jess, one of the staff organizers, at the Oct. 26 town hall.
He said organizers wanted to ensure the project was not just staff and student driven, but a community initiative as well. Three members of the public attended the meeting in addition to a few students and two teachers.
The town hall involved the attendees working in groups to come up with ideas to help the school become carbon neutral.
“We’re hoping after tonight to take all of the ideas that we’ve generated and collate them at a separate meeting,” he said.
“We’re going to take the information and generate a real set of goals, yearly annual goals, that look at 2030 being carbon neutral and working backwards to where we are today.”
Jess noted that it’s difficult to audit many aspects of everyday life at the high schools, for example, how many people drive cars, the types of car they drive and the amount of carbon emitted. Another example presented was the food eaten and where it came from.
“What we want to try to do is look at the building itself and the infrastructure that’s within it, the things that we can control and try to see where we can make adjustments to reduce our carbon,” Jess said.
The three main areas the town hall focused on were energy, waste management/minimization and transportation.
Energy
Heather Cameron, the other staff organizer, explained that the high school’s energy comes from the Centre Wellington Hydro grid.
“What that means for us is that most of our energy is generated through nuclear power stations but we still think it’s important to look at energy in terms of our overall environmental picture long run,” she said.
The school is a community hub and used in the evenings and on weekends but all the data isn’t available.
“There’s currently 42 schools in Upper Grand that are retrofitted with solar panels and there are some other schools that have different energy retrofits done to them as well but CW is not one of them,” Cameron said. “So that’s something we want to look at going forward for our school.”
Waste minimization
Currently the school is using four sorter bins, with a garbage and recycling bin in each classroom.
“We try to eliminate other sources of putting your waste in the halls so that it goes into the sorters and gets sorted,” she explained. The school also has reusable dish options which generate no waste. Based on the school board’s waste audits, each student produces 8.92kg of waste per year.
Transportation
Cameron said there was no data on transportation and because of the school’s location and the way Fergus and Elora are growing the school would like more information on transportation in terms of sustainability.
Next steps
The attendees then broke into groups of two or three and brainstormed surrounding the three focus topics or determining other areas of focus. “What we’re looking for are commonalities between everyone’s groups ideas so that we can show strength in an idea,” Jess said. The results will be presented at a later date.
