Sustainable Living Tasmania (SLT) has cleaned up the EPA Sustainability Award (Community) for their Energised Learning program in the 2024 Tasmanian Community Achievement Awards.
Snug resident and SLT Principal Sustainability Consultant Todd Houstein accepted the award on Friday, October 18.
The award-winning Energised Learning program was inspired by Todd's encounter with a group of students at Tarremah Steiner School who wanted to install solar panels for the school, but didn't know how.
The school called in Todd who ran a workshop session with the students to determine an action plan before leaving them to their own devices.
A year later, the students had their solar panels installed.
"SLT is big on filling young people's capacity to tackle climate change," Todd said.
"We're still definitely trying to reduce Tasmania's emissions everywhere we can, but we also need to prepare the future generations to face climate change."
The Energised Learning program is a resource for high schools to run project-based learning with a focus on sustainability.
SLT has created a website teachers can utilise that lists a series of projects, or schools can come up with their own, as Taroona High School did.
Todd said some Taroona students designed a controlled scientific experiment to test the idea that it's better to leave heat pumps running overnight than to warm up a completely cold room in the morning.
The students found it always used significantly more energy to run the heat pump overnight than to switch it off and let the room go cold, although Todd conceded the results may vary depending on the type of heater and the insulation of the room.
"It's always nice to receive recognition of all the hard work of the people who ran the project," Todd said of winning the award, mentioning that many of the mentors in the Energised Learning program volunteered their time.
Todd said that SLT's focus for the future is to come up with new and innovative ways to deliver sustainability focused education that fits schools' different capacities and hinted at an exciting new project he has coming for Snug.