The brilliant brains at Beckenham Primary School have been looking into the air-conditioner - waste water gushes and gurgles away down the drain. "We want to stop the waste and save this water and reuse it somewhere else!"
The students at Beckenham Primary School are planning to minimize the water wastage from the evaporative air-conditioners at our school and reuse it elsewhere on the school grounds. We are doing research to see if the water is useable in the kitchen garden to water our school vegetables or if it’s only suitable for decorative plants. This reuse of the waste water would make us a more sustainable school and that would align with the SDG Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
The plan is for our school to reuse waste water for our school gardens will reduce the amount of water we use from taps and reticulation for watering. Students are designing a system where the water can be moved along pipes or tubes to garden areas instead of the drain. Our school has 16 classrooms in the main section of the school each with an air-conditioning unit. If this works with one - perhaps it can be used for all of them.
“‘I could not believe the amount of water pumping out of the pipe when we turned the air-conditioner off. I had not considered what a waste of water this was!’”
If we spread the idea, perhaps future schools could take into account the collection of waste water when the schools are being built, so it is automatically reused in a sustainable way. Our school is 109 years old and many improvements have been added to the school over the years, but new schools have the opportunity to make the changes during the design phase.
