2022 Lautoka Clean Schools Competition Awards Day

Lautoka City Council today hosted the schools in Lautoka and congratulated them at the Awards function of the 2022 Lautoka Clean Schools Competition for their tireless efforts towards the 3R (Reduce, Reuse & Recycle) program.

The Chief Guest for the day, LCC’s Head of Services, Mr. Deepak Lal, also congratulated the tireless efforts and wonderful collaboration exemplified by Lautoka City Council and Ministry of Education, culminating in this annual event today.

On this note, he also commend the Japanese International Cooperation Agency [JICA] for initiating, implementing and supporting this noble initiative for the last three years to address environment consciousness at grass root level.

Clean Schools Program is an investment into the life’s of our children. They are an important agent of change and with the right guidance, we all hope that the ideas that we instilled into their life’s out of this program will be replicated in their families, their communities and hopefully as they grow to be leaders, they will forever champion environment cleanliness.

In more developed countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, United Sates and Europe, history has shown that the cleanliness of their environment today is a result of investment in environment awareness done some 30 – 40 years ago.  

The program recognizes an important initiative and intervention in the life’s of our children and the successes that have been achieved to date, I understand that the scope of the clean school’s program was expanded to 31 schools in both rural and urban. This is indicative of the commitment and willingness of all stakeholders to replicate the good environmental practices to our children and communities.

Mr. Lal said, our dependence on imported processed goods and materials cannot be denied. Over the last decade, urbanization, population growth, consumerism, commercial and industrial development, tourism, and most other forms of development have all contributed in varying ways to increasing quantities of processed items entering Fiji.

The increasing amount of waste generated if not managed properly now has the potential to cause negative impacts on the fragile environment, including vital natural ecosystems like marine life, water and underground water reservoirs, severely placing enormous constraints on these existing limited resources.

He also highlighted on, littering, open burning of waste, backyard accumulation of refuse, illegal dumping sites, vector breeding in waste piles, etc are only few common examples of waste being improperly managed. These types of behaviour are an indication of the society we embrace. well, hopefully not anymore.

Due to our geographical isolation and relatively small recycling market, it becomes very difficult to recycle waste in Fiji. In addition, finding suitable landfill sites is quite difficult whilst management of existing disposal sites is becoming a challenge and financial burden.

We must all show concern on the improper management and disposal of utilized processed imported goods’ as it has the potential to impact some important sectors of our economy like tourism, cleanliness of our towns food supplies and public health.

Hence, like other environment initiatives of the Lautoka City Council, the Lautoka Clean Schools Competition has been initiated as one of the road map in addressing the solid waste management problems.

The objectives of this noble initiative are:

1. To give the opportunity for schools to start proper waste management.
2. To target children in creating awareness on learnings from school activities on the concept of waste minimization to homes and communities as we all know that children’s are regarded as effective agents of change.

He mentioned that some schools have exceptionally done well whilst some schools still have rooms for improvements. We all know that you children have many ideas and are always full of energy and enthusiasm. But you need the guidance of teachers and a bit of supervision to explore your full potential.

Once again, he urged all the participating schools, especially the teachers through the support of the Ministry of Education to recognize this important initiative and further develop innovative ways in your future work programs as we all play a major role in steering our young children to adopt environment friendly practices for a sustainable future.

At last, he congratulated the winning schools for their initiative, hard work and commitment.

He said, he is positive that in partnership and with our united effort, we can all address the waste management problem that is an issue of concern for all of us globally.

He also thanked the Education Office (West) and the Department of Environment for the active and valuable support which has made this programme a success in Lautoka.