Earth Hour 2015 Community Celebrations

Amruta Khemkalyani

Sustainability Tribe (previously known as Green Living in Dubai) organized the first Community Awareness Event to celebrate Earth Hour 2015. We organized ‘Family Fun Earth Hour 2015 celebrations’ and I am glad to share with you that it went well :-).

DIY Paper Lantern and Recycled Tin Lantern made during our event

The theme of our Earth Hour 2015 celebrations was ‘Reduce Reuse Recycle’! (You can find more about 3Rs and DIYs on our blog under Green Home section)

John giving a talk, Paper Lantern making

The highlight of our celebration was a talk about the local recycling service. John Van Zuylen from Homecycle delivered the informative talk about their recycling system created for every household in UAE. Our guests found information about their service very useful. Guests asked questions about it and even said they will try this service. I talked about my experience as a Homecycle user. Check out the review of the Homecycle on our blog under the conscious consumer section.

As promised to our guests we had eco-activities for kids. Not just kids but even parents and adults liked our eco-activities! We made a paper lantern with kids. Older kids enjoyed making it on their own. Younger kids enjoyed decorating waste plastic bottles (juice and milk bottles) to make an educational toy. I call it ‘shapes and color discovery bottle’. This educational bottle toy was created to teach kids how we can reuse items to make something useful out of it instead of throwing it away. Also, I displayed and explained how to make a lantern out of a tin box. The one shown here created out of the formula milk packaging box.

Shapes and Color Discovery Bottle made out of a plastic juice bottle
(Recycled Educational Toy for younger kids)

In the end, our guest was given eco-goodies, consist of paper car bags, Mr. bin paper trash cone for the beach by Keep It Clean and a Glass jar with goodies by Green Living In Dubai, which I made out of baby food jars another example of reusing waste bottles.

I would like to thank John and Michelene from Homecycle for sparing an evening for our event and providing valuable information about how to recycle in UAE from the comfort of our home and giving eco goodies to our guests. And lastly, thank you to all of our guests who attended ‘Family Fun Earth Hour Celebrations’. I am sure you had fun! All of these lovely people made our first Green Event successful!

Check out a few more photos of the event on our Facebook page. Keep checking our blog for future Eco events…

Kids showing Paper Lantern and Discovery Bottle made by them