Wayne Chan Channel NewsAsia 6 Jun 12;
SINGAPORE: The Singapore Environment Council (SEC) plans to get children to start young on saving the environment.
It plans to take this message to the pre-schools, through a national environmental education programme next year.
In an exclusive interview with Channel NewsAsia, the SEC's executive director, Mr Jose Raymond, said the programme aims to teach young children to recycle, as well as save water and energy.
To do this, the SEC will have to train teachers and produce textbooks for pre-schoolers.
"We will reach out to Singaporean pre-schoolers through an approach that is engaging, yet easy-to-grasp. By cultivating eco-friendly habits from a young age, we hope that these habits will become ingrained in our pre-schoolers and see them through to adulthood. Ultimately, our aim is to provide a sustainable method of raising Singapore's level of eco-consciousness as a whole," said Mr Raymond.
Mr Raymond highlighted this strategy, as part of efforts to get more aggressive in environmental outreach programmes.
Another strategy is to be more targeted adults through its eco-office programme.
Earlier this year, the SEC announced that it wanted to get another 100 offices certified as "eco-office" this year.
Before SEC announced this new target, it had only managed to get 107 offices certified green since 2003.
Currently, it's almost halfway towards achieving its latest goal, with 41 offices already eco-certified this year.
Singapore's 15 town councils - which employ over 1,000 staff - are also on board.
They've pledged to earn the "eco-office" label by August this year.
Albert Teng, general manager of Holland-Bukit Panjang Town Council, said: "This is a way for us to tell the staff to be personally involved. And perhaps when they carry along these habits back home, they find that they actually realise something tangible such as saving electricity bills and water bills."
The SEC also plans to reach out to specific sectors, starting with banks, architectural firms and legal offices.
Mr Raymond said for such companies - which are paper intensive – saving the environment also means saving money.
"There are cost savings for every company and sometimes they can run into the thousands if they actually are able to cut back on usage of paper, water, electricity and just change the way they function inside the office. This is what I am going to be reaching out and try to get the point across a bit more aggressively - that there is cost savings," said Mr Raymond.
Since joining the SEC as executive director last September, Mr Raymond said he doubled his staff from about 11 to 25 to help with the more aggressive approach he is taking.
"What I've also done is to open up the areas where we can actually source for revenue. We must always function on a model where we rely as little as possible on government funds. We must always have a self-sustaining model. I'll continue to look for new avenues to bring revenue into the SEC so that savings can be ploughed back into better environmental programmes for the public."
One of these is a project worth S$640,000 that PUB awarded to the SEC in April to develop two new trails as part of the national water agency's ABC Waters Learning Trails programme, which aims to revamp the 100 waterways islandwide by 2030.
There are currently 20 revamped waterways.
Mr Raymond said that most of the tender amount will go to paying for the coordinators, web design, promotional materials, advertisements and research analysis.
Under the tender, SEC will have to reach out to 25,000 lower secondary school students in 12 months and conduct 20 training workshops for teachers and student leaders
It will also have to increase school presence at the upcoming Singapore International Week and at World Water day 2013.
SEC will also make use of the existing volunteer network to find 30 active coordinators, as well as to provide additional training to educate them about the different ABC waterway characteristics and history.
Since the educational tours started in March 2011, more than 9000 students have participated in the tour of the seven ABC waterways.
More than 100 schools have also adopted the waterways to clean the waters and conduct learning trails.
SEC will have to get another 80 secondary schools to become waterway adopters by next April.
- CNA/fa
