MORE than 1,000 teenagers and their parents attended the Second Shenzhen Teenagers' Environmental Protection Festival at the Shenzhen Children's Palace on Saturday (June 3).

The festival, sponsored by the city's environmental protection bureau, is aimed to educate the next generation of Shenzheners about environmental protection.

The festival, which had the theme of "Recycle and Saving," featured games, exhibitions, movies, performances and drawing competitions to explain the "dos and don'ts" of environment conservation to young people.

Children from tens of local primary and high schools performed in a dance competition hosted by Liu Chunyan, the famous CCTV hostess who flew in from Beijing for the event.

Entries to a recent environmental protection poster design competition and photographs depicting the city's mangrove forest were also exhibited during the festival.

A seven-meter-high artificial "tree" made from 100,000 used wooden chopsticks collected by local volunteers was displayed to the public for the first time at the festival. A volunteer who was part of the team that put the tree together said collecting and assembling the chopsticks had taken several months.

"We want to tell more Shenzheners that there would be no trees left for the next generation, if we keep using one-off chopsticks every day," said a representative of the volunteers.

More than 45 billion pairs of chopsticks are used on the mainland every year, causing 25 million trees to disappear annually.

Children were asked to write down things they planned to do to preserve the environment on a leaf-shaped paper and hang it on the chopstick tree.

The festival is an annual event held between June 1, International Children's Day, and June 5, World Environment Day. It was first held last year.

Editor: Wing