Greening the Simon’s Town Museum – Environmental Action Plan.

The Simon’s Town Museum has committed to contribute to a change in organizational behavior and operations to ensure a carbon neutral future. As a Museum, we are not large producers of greenhouse gasses. However, the Museum commits itself to focus reducing our impact on the environment by waste reduction, diversion, division.

The Museum diversion and division plan is premised on:

· We endeavor to reduce the amount of our waste that ends up at the landfill which contributes to the emission of greenhouse gasses by refuse, recycling, reusing.

· We commit to include the values of refuse, recycling, reusing in our educational programmes to encourage our young visitors and future generations to do the same.

· We hope to encourage our communities and local businesses to become involved in the waste management programme.

Our Green plan will be implemented on an organizational, educational and exhibition level.

Organisational – Altering the behavior of the staff to adapt to greening principles of refusing, reusing, and recycling.

Educational-Revamping our educational programmes to include waste education and fun activities with collected plastics. Eg. Creating a communal mural made of collected plastics that will be installed in the Museum. The aim of revamping our educational programmes in this manner is to cultivate a generation of youth that understand the impact of plastic use and are committed to caring for the planet by monitoring their own behaviors.

Exhibitions-make use of collected plastics for mosaics and exhibitions thereby reducing the amount of plastic that ends up in the landfills and ultimately in our oceans. Be conscious of the materials that we make use of in our exhibition making processes. Include community involvement in creating murals made from plastic.

Based on the basic environmental audit that was conducted, the Simon’s Town Museum has various environmental waste diversion practices in place. These Include:

o Documenting electrical usage

o Turning lights on and off when needed

o Make use of LED lights

o Fix leaking taps

o Encouraging visitors to save water

o Water wise plants

o Biodegradable packaging in gift shop

Areas that the Museum needs to work on:

o Biodiversity Protection – growing own garden and increasing indigenous plants on site

o Water Collection – collecting surplus rain water

o Waste diversion- Waste separation, Wet waste management.

To learn more and get involved contact

Tazneem

education@simonstownmuseum.co.za

Cathy

Cathy@simonstownmuseum.co.za

Greening STM

Greening STM

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