Our IBDP Students Saved 455.7 Tons of Water with Their Projects

Our high school IBDP class students from our Levent Campus, sold and exchanged second-hand clothes on Tuesday, January 17th in the scope of their “Give a Second Life to Your Clothes! project. Our students saved 455.7 tons of water with this project.

Within the framework of the project (which is an interdisciplinary project with the inclusion of Environmental Systems and Societies, Film, Mathematics and English B classes), our students completed the following activities:

• They learned how water scarcity, which is a universal problem, can arise in different geographies due to physical and man-made circumstances.
• All 11 IB TM students calculated the amount of water they used during the weekend (which included eating and drinking) using their mathematical knowledge, and became aware of the amount of water they consumed in just 2 days and gave presentations where they evaluated their own usage of water.
• Our 10 IB students Yonca Öztürk, Öykü Çalışkan, Ege Bilmece and Ata Rüştüoğlu, raised awareness in between students and staff about how much water is consumed in the production of jeans/pants, t-shirts/shirts, sweatshirts/sweaters and shoes, and how second hand clothing can reduce water scarcity. These posters in English took two months to prepare and helped raise awareness by showing how the use of clothing can reduce water scarcity.

According to these posters these are the amounts of water used for each piece of clothing;

• For the production of one t-shirt/shirt 2700 lt – 900 days of drinking water (WWF)
• For one pair of trousers 8183 lt – showering 104 times or drinking coffee 12000 times (Tree Hugger)
• For one sweatshirt 3350 lt * 1116 days of drinking water or showering 42 times (Elle MacArthur Foundation)
• For one pair of shoes 8543 lt – 2847 days of drinking water or showering for 109 days

After sharing the posters our students prepared using formulas in the classrooms, they organised the sale and exchange of second-hand clothes, in which students and teachers could participate voluntarily. They aided in the savings of water resources by selling and exchanging 27 second-hand trousers/jeans, 33 t-shirts/shirts and 44 sweatshirts/sweaters. They contributed to the saving of 455.7 tons of water in total. Thus, they saved water that could meet the needs of 151900 people for one day.

Yonca Öztürk, one of our 10IBF class students, shared her experiences:

“The second-hand clothing sales and exchange event, which we have been working on and organising with the support of our teachers for the last 1-2 months, has been more productive than our expectations. I think that being aware of the positive effects of our shopping habits on the environment and the water and learning what we can do to reduce water waste added a new perspective to the lives of everyone who contributed to the project. In order to make this project happen, we had to do research, plan for hours and collect data. Thanks to this event we held on Tuesday, we prevented approximately 450 tons of water from being wasted. Even though this number is not very high compared to global data, I am confident that we will make a great contribution to the environment with the continuation of this event.”