by Jennifer Champeau
Chemistry teacher Peter Vacchina and five of his students are going to a conference in Portugal January 10-19 to present their Sustainability Matters campaign. Their goal is “sustaining global awareness of conservation, reusing, and recycling. It matters because nowadays we take for granted what we have and forget about the environment,” says Arianna Sequenzia, a junior at Hudson High who will be going to the conference.
Hannah Fuller, Jennifer Kallin, Olivia Banks, Olivia Melo, Arianna Sequenzia, and Vacchina are attending the UNESCO conference in Portugal this year. Vacchina and his students have been going to the conference for six years now, and each year they present a project based on the theme of the conference.
To promote this year’s theme they chose to hang bike tires on a tree outside. The bike tires symbolize that transportation is a global issue. They also represent environmental sustainability issues like fossils fuels that pollute the environment. Many other countries use bikes commonly as transportation. When people use bikes for transportation, they use less fossil fuels.
Vacchina’s chemistry classes decorated bike tires and hung them on trees outside of the art hallway. The five students have been working on this project since last May. Some of his students even went to school on a Sunday morning to construct the project.
“I enjoyed making the sculpture. It was fun as a team to work together and laugh as we put pieces up. Besides the sculpture outside, we made a mosaic inside of a bicycle, and I liked making this better. For this, we created a bike out of mosaic tiles using the American and Portugal flag colors. Then after we created this, we brought the bike to life by putting them on the trees,” says Sequenzia.
The students going will be presenting a PowerPoint that they put together. In the PowerPoint they will present pictures of the sculpture that they created, a video and additional information about why sustainability matters.
Vacchina loves the conference and the trip to Portugal saying, “My students are challenged to think differently about the world, and I love seeing the students finding their way in different cultures.”
