‘WOW’ - WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT!

We are inviting UK school-age students from year 5 and above to team up and present ONE BIG WOW (Wipe Out Waste) IDEA for their school to Footprint Friends, for an opportunity to be selected for the WOW finals to be held at a superb location in the summer of 2011.

Dead line for entries is Tuesday 8th March 2011. This year we have a special ‘welly’ boot camp for those schools who get through to the qualifying round – hosted by Yeo Valley organic farm. Boot camp will be 23rd and 24th March and selected schools will be invited to attend on ONE of these days.

WOW STUDENTS BRIEF:

Their brief is to: group up into teams of up to 4; assess the potential impact of waste wiped out via the adoption of their ONE BIG WOW IDEA; complete the WOW questionnaire below with a sponsoring teacher; and submit it to the team here at Footprint Friends.

Waste* in this context would be in the broadest sense; it could be referenced by energy, water, food, materials, carbon, time and money and so on. They will also need to speculate how much waste would be saved in schools if their idea was adopted nationally.

*Our definition of waste is anything that is being used carelessly, being wasted, thrown away unnecessarily, misused, is surplus to requirement and so on. - The WOW aim is to encourage schools to get closer and closer to being zero waste. Put simply, zero waste extends current approaches to recycling by introducing the concept of circular systems in which as much waste as possible is reused, similar to the way that resources are reused in nature.

The application process is intentionally simple – all your students have to do is come up with ONE idea.

Schools can submit more than one entry if they wish.