Priory School Model United Nations (MUN) (located in the UK) is very much in its infancy, launching as a club in September 2019; but it has had a very successful year: at its peak, 18 students attended weekly sessions.
Priory MUNers began doing outreach work leading assemblies and having a MUN Impact table at school open days where they gathered ideas from parents, staff and students about what changes, linked to Global Goals, they’d like to see at school and within the community.
MUN Impact has been key to the founding mission at Priory and the problem of litter, particularly single-use plastic in school, an issue they became increasingly aware of. With disposable cups being given out freely to both prep and senior school children and no recycling facility, they felt they had a mission on their hands to change mindsets and encourage whole school support for SDG 13 – Climate Change, SDG 14 – Life in water and SDG 15 – Life on land.
Within MUN sessions the school researched plastic pollution and students were shocked by their findings. The world is currently producing nearly 300 million tons of plastic each year and although plastic is useful, many of these products are created for single-use; 50 percent of plastic used once and thrown away. Only nine percent of the world’s plastic is recycled — a problem, because most plastics are not biodegradable and typically take more than 400 years to degrade and plastic never fully degrades; rather it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that are eventually ingested by marine life. Single-use plastics are the worst offenders and include plastic bags, cups, food packaging, and straws.
School support for the MUN Impact mission has been fantastic. After delivering a thorough presentation of their ideas linked to Global goals to school leaders in the boardroom, it was agreed that there would be full support — for what is now — a whole-school-site total ban on single use plastic. There are no more single use plastic cups in the school canteen, nurse’s office or given out at open days or school fayres. In addition to this, the school now has a ban on the selling of or use single use water bottles. They are very grateful in particular to a student-staff team who have got together to make non-for-profit reusable bottles on site. The club now has a recycling team as a branch of MUN in school and have an agreement with canteen staff and a school eco-team, to extend recycling to include crisp packets.
The MUN Impact team will also be planting additional trees in the school grounds next academic year and are encouraging early-years through sixth to form a global goals awareness art project. Small steps by everybody in school to reduce plastic has already bettered the school environment and got many buzzing with ideas about how they can make further change. As a school, they are sending less waste to landfills and into the ocean which ultimately means that their food and water will remain less contaminated. Although MUN is young in its years and has only a handful of students, they have proven that where there is a will, there is a way. Small steps do add up.