Your sustainability project

This is where the subject stops being reading and becomes something real. You will design a project for your school or community, built the way the working solutions in this subject were built: an honest measurement of the problem first, then a plan that a real organisation could actually run, then a way of knowing whether it worked.

Choose a project

• An energy or waste audit of your school, with costed recommendations, in the style of the bin audit from the lessons.
• A tree planting or habitat plan for a corner of the school grounds or a local space, with species, costs and a maintenance plan.
• A water saving proposal: where the water goes now, where the losses are, and what fixing them would cost and save.
• An awareness or behaviour campaign with a measurable goal, like lifting the recycling capture rate or cutting contamination, where you say the target number out loud before you start.

Build it like the solutions that work

Every effective project in this subject started by measuring before acting, so start yours the same way: spend the first part of the project establishing the real numbers, because a plan built on a guess is a guess with a nicer cover. Then design the intervention, name who does what and when, and cost it honestly, including the boring parts like bins, signage and someone's time. Finally, decide before you launch how you will measure success, so that afterwards nobody can quietly move the goalposts. A project that would genuinely cut the school's waste by a tenth, with numbers a sceptical principal could check, beats a grand plan that nobody could ever run.