For World Environment Week 2026, the Sustainability Committee took a deliberately different approach to environmental education, moving past distant global crises to confront the College with hard data from inside its own gates.
Sustainability Captain Sunny Zhang opened the week at senior assembly, delivering an address to the student body and screening a short film created by the whole committee featuring many students and staff to examine daily campus habits.
“Often when we talk about these massive environmental challenges, it is easy to get overwhelmed,” Zhang told the assembly. “We believe that global change does not start with international treaties. It starts right here on the ground, with our daily habits, our education, and the choices we make.”
To illustrate how easily litter becomes invisible in everyday life, the committee also staged a social experiment on the main driveway. A single empty container was left on the concrete path while a camera recorded passing foot traffic throughout the day. Hours passed as dozens of students walked past without intervening, showing how easily rubbish blends into the background during busy school routines.
The central project brought the numbers into sharper focus. Committee members sorted through campus recycling bags on a tarp laid out in the quad to measure contamination rates directly. The manual audit revealed that 80 percent of the items in the sampled yellow bins were non-recyclable, driven primarily by soft plastics, takeaway coffee cups, and food scraps that spoiled otherwise clean paper and aluminium collections.
Alongside the audit, the committee collaborated with the Stanmore Library to set up an environmental research display featuring practical guides on municipal waste streams. The audit findings are now being used to design clearer bin bay signage and support the ongoing Return and Earn challenge across the houses.