A group of Columbus School students called Carbon Footprint Team, are working for a good cause to help the environment and give a good example to society.

A few years ago, The Columbus School became a part of a global program created to solve social problems in the whole world, this program is called GIN (Global Issues Network). This group is composed by students all around the world, looking after different problems in  society and their solutions. One of the major problems being addressed  since a long time, and will continue to be a problem if we don’t do something, is global contamination. Carbon Footprint is one of the many groups in GIN working to solve this issue.

“The Carbon FootPrint team, is a team made up mostly of students. We want to emphasise on making a change in the school, and with this, give an example to society”,  Paloma Urrea said.

As one of their members describes, the students in this group are working on making little changes in the school that will not affect anyone  in a negative way, but together, they will make a positive change in the environment.

“For example, with plastic, we’ve been making a great advance because for example in the school, the students only drank water from the solid plastic bottles, knowing that there were fountains with free pure water. So we took the decision to stop selling plastic bottles in the cafeterias.”, Urrea said.

They are not only working on the plastic bottles and leaving the problem like that, they are finding more ideas and creating new ways of reducing the carbon footprint.

“For paper, we are trying to organise the amount of paper wasted for each teacher by creating a system that lets the teacher know the amount of paper he is wasting and help him reduce it in any possible way”, Urrea said.

Our school wants to be an example for all the other schools and for society, by working on this we can be accredited in several important organisations that fight against this problem.

“ Our goal is not to win prizes or money, but we do want to be recognised and be shown as an example to society and other schools, so together we can really make a change and give the world a hand.”, Urrea said.

In this moment, Carbon Footprint is the GIN group making the most changes, not because they’re the best or more intelligent, but this is a problem that has hundreds of solutions around the school.

“ Carbon Footprint is the most active GIN team for the moment, they’re always working on getting better and finding new ideas to help the environment” Maria Londoño said.

The Columbus School wants to be an example for other schools as well as the whole society, if we accomplish this, more and more people will start to help and the change will mean something good for the world.

“Not only that, the Carbon FootPrint team also takes initiatives to accredit our school to Echo Schools which is an american organisation that certificates schools depending on their ambiental state and we want to reach the gold medal”, Urrea said.