On World Nature Conservation Day 2022 attention has been brought to the inaugural staging of The Earth Prize awards which took place earlier in March of this year. There four national competitors were chosen as overall and runner-up winners to share in combined awards valued $US200,000. The top four teams representing Vietnam, Jamaica, Korea, and Thailand were selected winners from among candidates comprising over 650 teams in 516 high schools across 114 countries.

Team Viridis, an all-girls team from Campion College and members of the Green-Generation Club, in presenting their project for addressing domestic food wastage, emerged an overwhelming favourite, first qualifying among the top 10 finalist before moving on to be selected a runner-up winner of the Earth Prize earning a sterling US$25,000 for their school’s chosen environmental project.

The overall winners from Hanoi, Vietnam, another all-girls team, ingeniously engineered a more sustainable method of making female sanitary “Adorbsy” pads from the natural biodegradable fibres of their locally grown dragon fruit peel.

The name Viridis was chosen as the Latin equivalent of the word ‘green’ which thematically aligns with the mission of The Earth Prize as well as Campion’s Green Generation Club, where this new global initiative was first introduced by club President Rhys Greenland and further proposed as a group project by Rachel Armstrong. Fellow club members Ashley West and Brianna Harris immediately came on board and were also joined by another environmental enthusiast and student of the sciences, Jordan Whittick. The team invited the supervision of a favourite teacher, Celia Webster, head of the English Department, who graciously accepted the challenge. Together they formed an alliance over two semesters to brainstorm and research areas in which an environmental development and awareness gap could be identified and therefore where a need could be filled.

The team’s decision to focus on local issues such as the impact of the current pandemic on worsening children’s hunger, global inflation on food prices, the exacerbation of food insecurity which coexists ironically with the prevalence of domestic food wastage, estimated to be as high as 30 per cent of domestic agricultural production (whilst 12.8 per cent of the population, a stunning 400,000 Jamaicans live with hunger) led to its decision to make this a project about preventing food wastage.

The challenge would be to promote prevention by creating a re-distribution tool which led to their eventual creation of a prototype software application built to aid supermarkets, producers, and vendors to sell perishable food at lower prices to consumers before they expire and get dumped. The application is also intended to be used by large and small farmers to reduce the dumping of glut production that gets recycled as animal feed or compost.

The Earth Prize was founded by Peter McGarry, a hedge fund manager based in Geneva, Switzerland, and managed by principals Angela McCarthy, the CEO, and Diana Moure, head of communications, who have created a resource-rich problem-solving mentorship and a high-level platform with a mission to “inspire, educate, mentor and empower students with innovative ideas to tackle environmental challenges”.

It is the philosophy of the Earth Prize leadership that teenagers, born to this Digital Age, are natural pioneers for change being predisposed to harnessing technology to solve environmental problems and further, that it is their ideas and innovation applied on a global scale that will improve human survival.

The Earth Prize is equally focused on mentorship, knowledge-dissemination and scientific collaboration. To further expose and promote the work of its “change-makers” aged 13 to 19 years, the organisation collaborates with the Swiss-based Villars Institute in its convening of a series of annual conferences, launched in June 2022. This year’s winners were therefore awarded fully funded scholarships as participants and were collectively inducted as Villars Fellows to the Youth Symposium. As foundation fellows, it is anticipated that they will serve as future mentors to new Earth Prize scholars.

Team Viridis not only advanced as the leading Caribbean country, but was the sole finalist within the Americas and the top placing team in the entire western hemisphere, outpacing the likes of top schools like Eton College from the UK and other prominent high schools from North America, Africa and the Middle East.