Hi, this is Zaiyan A and Christian R, and we are both grade 6 students at TK. The Conscious Festival, organised by “Green Is The New Black”, took place on 3 November 2019. We participated in the festival the year before last, and were invited by Ms Vandana Dilipkumar (she works closely with the organisers) to be speakers again in 2019. 

Even though we were the festival’s youngest speakers, we had an important message to share with our audience. Our talk was on the topic of travelling plastic-free. We chose this topic because we were concerned that hotels use too many plastic bottles. We felt that it’s time for hotels to adopt more eco-friendly alternatives, especially as many other industries are already doing so. We provided our audience with a solution: to invest in portable water filters. While these might be expensive or hard to get, we believe it is worth the hassle if it can protect the environment from further pollution! 

Since we had limited time on stage, we worked very hard on our speech - especially as we only had 5 minutes to deliver it. The speech went through many rewrites and revisions, and we also had to do a lot of research. It was a challenging process, but Christian and I managed to pull it off through teamwork and not giving up till the end! 

All in all, Christian and I are glad we had the opportunity to speak at the festival because it gave us the chance to raise awareness about sustainability, and to help people make better decisions about the way they live. We can’t wait until next year’s festival so we can do it again!  

We would like to thank Ms Vandana Dilipkumar and Ms Stephanie Dickson for giving us the opportunity to participate in the festival for two years in a row; and to Mr. Marco Preisig for supporting us with his industry knowledge, relevant data and useful products.