THE environment clubs of St Jago Cathedral Prep and Hillel Academy, earlier this month, included as part of their activities the cleaning of beaches in St Catherine.

St Jago Cathedral Prep descended on Prendy’s on the Beach on December 4, well prepared to clean. Dressed in yellow T-shirts with their club’s logo and equipped with safety gloves and large garbage bags, they got to work, under the supervision of teachers Nadia Guy, Allan Laraque and Victoria Smikle.

“This is just one of the many planned projects we conduct outside of our school environs annually,” Guy told Environment Watch.

“We decided to clean up this specific beach because the school and the beach are located in the same parish. Also, the management of Prendy’s is very co-operative. We were allowed to leave the plastic bags with the collected wastes on the coast until someone comes to collect them. Many beaches don’t allow this to happen,” she added.

St Jago Cathedral was this year’s second-place winner in the fourth annual Urban Development Corporation (UDC) Hellshire School’s Environment Competition. Their entry project was based on hydrophonics — growing plants in water without soil. They have since implemented a hydrophonics system at their school and are encouraging other environment clubs to follow their example.

Beach cleaning aside, students of St Jago Cathedral Prep also regularly leave the confines of their school to conduct advocacy programmes at other educational institutions.

And while St Jago Cathedral Prep were conducting their beach clean-up, students of the environment club of Hillel Academy, were at the neighbouring Causeway Fisherman Village conducting their own.

Students of Hillel trudged through the muck near the beach to get to the abundance of plastic bottles and other debris that littered the beach.

“It was one of the most successful beach clean-up projects we had. The students were able to see how they should care for the environment (and) also the possible impacts we face from pollution,” said teacher Tanya Cuthbert, who supervised the work of the Hillel students.

The two clean-up activities yielded 36 large garbage bags of mostly plastic waste. The students are now advocating for Jamaicans to not only restore, but also reuse and recycle products they use.