Communities Get Together for Earth Day: TKS & Thuwal School Team Up with KAUST Groups

We hope you were able to join in the Earth Day celebrations at the Harbor Sports Field recently.  If you took part in the creation of the vertical garden or made a bag out of a recycled t-shirt then you were part of a collaboration between The KAUST School, Thuwal Schools, KAUST Gardening Club, Students’ Arts Group, Green Group and Social Responsibility.

The activities were the culmination of a lot of planning and preparatory work between all the groups involved, contributing to the overall Earth Day Celebrations co-ordinated by Averda.  Students from TKS and Thuwal Schools visited each other’s schools for workshops.  TKS students went to Thuwal to share their knowledge of recycling t-shirts into bags and Thuwal students made two trips to work with their peers at TKS to build, sand and paint the pallets for the vertical gardens.  The students also gathered together a huge array of plastic bottles of different shapes and sizes, chopping them into various shapes and sizes so they could be transformed into plant pots.

On the night, the students and teachers from TKS and Thuwal High School were excellent volunteers, joining with the Students Arts Group, Green Group Gardening Club and Social Responsibility in assisting on the stalls to demonstrate how to recycle a t-shirt into a bag and to guide people in painting the plant pots, filling them with earth and plants and then hooking them on the vertical garden.

Thank you to the students and staff of The KAUST School and Thuwal High School for all the co-ordination and planning beforehand.  Thank you to the Students Arts Group for providing the paints and brushes used to decorate the plastic plant pots and to Facilities for supplying the plants and compost from their greenhouse.  Thanks to the KAUST Chemical Warehouse for providing the pallets for the vertical garden.  The Enrichment Program was delighted that their rainbow of t-shirts from previous years were put to good use.  Thanks also to Campus Support and Averda for providing the booths and furniture.  Most importantly, thank you to everyone that stopped by and took part – we hope to see lots of vertical gardens around KAUST now and shoppers at Tamimi with their t-shirt bags!