ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE
The Green Dream Festival is an annual environmental festival held at Gabrielino High School in San Gabriel, California. Each year, we choose a new theme for the upcoming festival. This year, we've decided to focus on our LifeStraw project. We plan to collect and recycle bottles and cans from schools around Southern California -- beginning with our own school -- and using the proceeds (5¢ CRV per bottle or can) to buy LifeStraws for people in third-world countries. These are portable water purifiers developed by company Vestergaard-Frandsen, which last for up to one year.
| cans and/or bottles | $ | years of life for a human being | days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90 | 4.75 | 1 | 365 |
| 72 | 3.60 | 0.76 | 277 |
| 36 | 1.80 | 0.38 | 138 |
| 18 | 0.95 | 0.2 | 73 |
| 1 | 0.05 | 0.01 | 4 |
The 2009 Green Dream Festival, although focusing on this fundraising event, will also include speaker presentations, activities, and booths.
The Seventh UN Millennium Goal is to ensure environmental sustainability; this event recognizes how the condition of our environment affects each of us, and most important, what we can do about it. Together, we can turn empty bottles into clean water, trash into treasure, and the green dream into a reality.
We chose to hold the festival on the weekend of every Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday to honor the spirit of his message of social change, which in this day and age is profoundly tied to environmental change. This year, we've linked the impact of recycling on the environment to the impact on human lives through our LifeStraw project.
Watch our video:
