How you can celebrate World Ocean Day
How you can celebrate World Ocean Day
World Ocean Day occurs on the 8th of June every year and it is vital for SBMs to acknowledge this important date and celebrate it. As this day strives to encourage others to protect the oceans and our environment, SBMs must create activities for the whole school to get involved. However, this can be quite difficult to plan activities for the school through the hectic workload. To help you, we have sourced ways on how you can celebrate World Ocean Day and get everyone on board with protecting our oceans.
Why is it important to protect our oceans?
Our oceans are vital to protect for various reasons. Oceans cover 70% of the Earth’s surface and within them lives thousands of species of plants and animals. If our oceans continue to become polluted, these species are at the risk of dying.
The largest pollution factor for our oceans is plastic. It has been estimated that around 4.8 to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic have reached our oceans. This mainly comes from the fishing industry, but it is also the plastic waste everyone disposes of in the incorrect way. The plastic in the oceans has a huge impact on sea life, especially as plastic isn’t biodegradable, so it lasts for hundreds of years.
It is crucial for us to find alternative ways of disposing our plastic and reducing our plastic usage. Anything you can do, and your school can do to prevent further damage to our oceans is essential.
How can schools take part in World Ocean Day?
There are many activities big and small that you can do to get your school taking part in World Ocean Day. Below are a few examples for you to try for your staff and students. You can also tweak them however you like, to fit with your school or take as inspiration to create your own activities.
Try encouraging no seafood
The best way to protect our oceans is to encourage your school to avoid eating seafood or to take a break from seafood for a while. This is an action that can help to reduce poor practices from fisheries. There are a few sustainable and well-managed fisheries that aid healthy oceans, but the majority put a lot of pressure on marine ecosystems through extraction.
If your school kitchen offers any type of fish, such as fish fingers, cut these out of the menu. You can try this for Word Ocean Day to see if you could cut fish out for the long term. If the impact of doing this on the day is very little, then take steps with your kitchen staff to think of alternatives you can offer long term.
Plan an ocean trip
To educate students further on our oceans and the importance of healthy seas, plan an ocean trip with your staff. This can be done in various ways such as by year groups at different times. Work out how this could be done with teachers and gather volunteers for the trips. Once on the trip encourage teachers to plan activities and lessons about improving the oceans.
You could give inspiration to your teachers such as cleaning rubbish from the beach, reusing any plastic found in an art project, looking at maps of all our oceans and learning more about them, and a treasure hunt of finding objects around the beach and sea.
Suggest to staff that students should take time to appreciate the ocean and the connection they have with it. A huge connection humans have with the ocean is the air we breathe. More than half of Earth’s oxygen is produced by marine plants. When planning these trips, take time to educate staff on this so that students can sit by the sea, relax and breathe, thinking of what the ocean means to them and how they can help save it.
Avoid single use plastics
The largest threats to Earth’s oceans are plastic pollution and schools contribute to this greatly. Single use plastics are very common for various materials and resources schools need. To assist with protecting our oceans, avoid using single use plastics in your school as much as possible. Look into stocking up on sustainable and eco-friendly products to reduce your plastic waste in all areas.
Evaluate areas where your school uses the most single use plastics and how you can change this. A large area where single use plastics are commonly used in schools is through cleaning. Many cleaning products are stored in single use plastic containers, bottles and packaging. Switch these products to plant-based alternatives such as ocean savers. These cleaning products come in reusable bottles that are made from plastic sourced from our coastlines where it is most at risk of polluting the ocean. Having these products instead helps to use less plastic as you can reuse the bottles as well as reducing the chances of plastic entering our oceans. These are available for all areas such as bathroom and kitchen as well as multipurpose.
Create a World Ocean Day activity or event
Plan and create a World Ocean Day activity or event that your school can get involved in and the local community. This could be anything from screenings of ocean documentaries to a fair that’s all about the ocean raising money for an ocean charity of your choice. Whatever you choose for your school to do, invite the local community to attend and support. This is perfect for activities or events you are doing for a charity and also to educate the community about our oceans.
Encourage students to partake and get involved in the planning process. Gather a committee of students to aid you and your staff with each stage of the planning process from the beginning stages to the end result. Doing this is a great way to show students the importance of protecting our oceans and encourages them to take action in their lives.
As an SBM it is important to lead by example when it comes to protecting the Earth and the ocean. Consider joining in a local event such as a beach cleanup and round up some staff to join too. This should encourage students to realise what pollution can do to the ocean and take small steps to positively contribute to this.
Stock up on eco-friendly products
As well as reducing single use plastics in your school, stock up on eco-friendly products to use in many different areas. Think about packaging of products you buy the most such as stationery and how they are made too. As stationery can be one of the most damaging resources you purchase, consider switching stationery to eco-friendly versions such as eco ball point pens.
As well as considering the obvious areas where you can reduce plastic usage and be more environmentally friendly, you should think about other areas. This could be as obscure as what vacuums you are using in your school. Vacuums that require vacuum bags are more sustainable and help the environment in many ways. Switching this and sourcing eco-friendly bags could make a difference in protecting our oceans as less plastic is used.
Try these ways on how you can celebrate World Ocean Day on the 8th of June. Keep these new strategies in place beyond the World Ocean Day to ensure your school protects the ocean and the environment. Encourage staff and students to do their bit for the school as well as in their own lives as every small step counts to improving oceans.
Want more ways to make your school more sustainable? Read our compost blog to start your own school compost and strive to a greener future.
