JOHN Rollins Success Primary took top honours in this year’s LASCO Releaf Environmental Awareness Programme (REAP), walking away with 10 desktop computers, $100,000 for the most trees planted, and the LASCO trophy.

The St James-based institution planted 170 saplings over the eight-month period of the competition.

Bath Primary and Junior High School from St Thomas copped second place, taking home a multimedia projector and laptop; while Farm Primary and Junior High, also from western Jamaica, took home a flat screen television and DVD player for their third place effort.

This year’s competition, launched in September 2014, was held under the theme: ‘If there is a will, there will be no waste’. Two hundred and forty seven schools entered, an increase from 138 in the previous year. The programme, now in its third year, saw schools competing in different areas of sustainable environmental practices, including tree planting, recycling, energy conservation and gardening; as well as promoting sustainable development through the visual and performing arts.

Founder and executive chairman of the LASCO Group of Companies, Lascelles Chin, praised the participants on a job well done.

“The LASCO REAP programme represents a step in the right direction toward protecting our environment,” he remarked. “We are happy with the progress of the initiative over the three years.”

Lasco is the primary sponsor of the competition, the brainchild of reggae band Roots Underground, which started in 2012 with only 50 participants.

Education Minister Ronald Thwaites lauded LASCO for using the competition as a medium to educate students about environmental issues.

“This is transformed education taking place,” he said at the awards ceremony, held in the gardens of the Jamaica Pegasus on Wednesday, June 3.

“This is an occasion where we are lauding a new vista or platform for our people to learn.”

Tianna Huie of Albert Town Primary and Shaslee Campbell of Village Primary both won computer tablets for best essay and best poem, respectively. Prizes were also awarded for most bottles collected, best garden, visual arts, among other categories.

Sponsors included: Jamaica Observer, Walkerswood Caribbean Foods Ltd, Aurora Innovations, Lithographic Printers Limited, Goblin Hill Resort and Spa, RJR Communications Group, Forestry Department, US Peace Corps, Imagine Dat Entertainment, Spartan Health Club, Rototech Limited, Azans Ltd, and Recycling Partners of Jamaica.

— Aldane Walters