Opening Ceremony of Anugerah Hijau

On the 8th of March, 2011, we, Sri Aman's Eco Music Band finally got a chance to showcase the product of our many practice sessions and our diligence in memorising their drum beats over the course of the weeks leading up to our performance at the Malaysian Productivity Centre, during the opening ceremony of the annual Anugerah Hijau competition. The event was launched by Deputy Education Minister Datuk Dr Puad Zarkashi and was also attended by many esteemed guests of honour, including the New Straits Times Press group managing editor Datuk Zainul Arifin, Shell Malaysia general manager for corporate affairs Rowina Ghazali and CIMB regional director central 2 Freddie Acho Bian.


In the presence of such a number of big names in their respective fields, be it politics or mass media or perhaps even finance, it was no secret that we were anxious about our performance, though each and every one of us hoped for the best. The event began with everyone singing our national anthem, before we were called on stage to kick the event off with our performance. We sang one of our crowd favourites, Bumi, a parody of Justin Bieber's 'Baby', featured a new song, a parody of Katy Perry's 'Fireworks', gave a soulful rendition of our 'Twinkle, twinkle little star' parody, aptly retitled 'the Green Song', and of course, threw in one of our favourite drum beats, 'Durarara', for good measure.


After our performance, the founder and president of EcoKnights, Miss Yasmin Rasyid, remarked that Anugerah Hijau, a competition that has been held since 2009, has seen a marked growth in the number of participants since its establishment. She also commented on the capability of participants when it comes to pushing the bounds of creativity by going above and beyond the requirements of the competitions, citing last year's competition where participants were required to make robots out of recycled materials as an example. 'They were only told to create robots, robots that didn't necessarily have to move, but most of them came up with moving robots! We were very impressed.'


This year, some changes have been made to the competition guidelines. Instead of only being open to secondary school students, college students are also allowed to participate in this year's competition. There would be two categories, 'Totally Active' (Capture the Green) and 'Wildly Creative' (Trashion in Action), with the former requiring students to come up with a one to two minute video about the environment, while the latter requires students to create fashionable clothing out of everyday recycled items.


10 teams would be shortlisted in each category-five from secondary schools and five from colleges based on their submitted proposals, following which the shortlisted candidates in the 'Totally Active' category would attend a workshop conducted by Lara Ariffin, while the shortlisted candidates in the 'Wildly Creative' category would get the opportunity to attend a workshop conducted by Silas Liew.


The grand prize-winning team in each category would receive RM3000 in cash.