Sustainability
Melanie Sanderson
School of the Good Shepherd is a part of the Resource Smart School Program, which is a free program from Sustainability Victoria to help us improve our schools sustainability practices. The school needs to complete 5 modules:
- Core
- Waste
- Biodiversity
- Energy
- Water
To accomplish each module we have a number of actions that we need to complete. This term, our Eco Warriors and some classes are helping us to complete annual audits in each of the areas.
On Friday 20th of October, the Eco Warriors from Year 1 to Year 6 worked with Mrs Sanderson and Mrs Groves to start the Waste Audit.
The students audited the contents of 6 landfill bins from across the school armed with gloves and tongs. The students shared the following insights from the audit:
| I thought it was good because we learned about rubbish. | Giuliana -Year 1 |
| We were helping the environment but making sure that the food didn’t go in the waste. We put the food in the compost bin. | Alexandra - Year 1 |
| I did not feel happy about all of the rubbish I saw in the six bins. People at school waste too much food. Students should take their leftover food back home or put it straight into the compost bins, not into the general waste bins. People are making bad choices by putting all their leftover food in the general bin, that is wasting your parents money and throwing good food away while poor children do not have enough food to eat. Next time you shouldn't do that. | Levi - Year 2 |
I was pretty surprised at how much rubbish and food people are wasting because parents have been working hard on making lunches. People have been wasting perfectly good food.
I was very upset with what I saw. I didn't get why kids and teachers would waste this much. When I saw the organics section there was so much perfectly good food wasted. With one sandwich someone only took 2 bites. I think when it's canteen day, which is on Wednesday and Friday, kids throw their lunch out and eat food from the canteen. | Ava J - Year 2 |
| That there was a lot of different foods wasted, and different things that were not in the right bins. | Chloe - Year 3 |
| I felt shocked with what was in the waste that should not go in it. | Oliver - Year 3 |
| I was honestly shocked about how many things that are not supposed to go into the waste bin were actually in the waste bin. Things like paper, sandwiches, food scraps and so much more. For the future I'm hoping for our bins to be accurately sorted. | Christina - Year 4 |
| I was very disgusted by all of the rubbish in the wrong bin and I know that School of the Good Shepherd can try harder next time and I also noticed that there was lots of paper in our bin. | Spencer - Year 4 |
| I noticed that some people were wasting food and some foods were not in the right bins. | Sally Rose - Year 5 |
What I noticed when we were doing the bins is that there was a lot of food wasted in the canteen bags and plastic bags.
| Erin - Year 5 |
| There was a lot of waste of food coming from the lower grades. I remember seeing a full sandwich thrown out. It was horrendous but other than that there was not much. There was a lot of misplaced rubbish and compost all in the wrong bins but as the grades bins got higher there was less the wrong placement however that was quickly substituted for McDonalds. | Peter L - Year 6 |
| I am quite surprised by the statistics of this audit, as we usually put the correct rubbish in the correct bin, however this audit found us to be incorrect. We found this data by emptying out the bins and sorting through them as thoroughly as possible. The data we found is listed below, which was calculated from 776 pieces of rubbish. | Olivia - Year 6 |
Olivia and Peter from Year 6 looked at the percentages of different categories found in the bin:
- General Waste 64.44%
- Plastic 5.24%
- Other 1.94%
- Paper / Cardboard 6.25%
- Commingled 7.98%
- Organics / Compost 14.304% Thank-you for the Fiji Kidz donations. The drive is now complete.
Thank you in advance.
Melanie Sanderson
Sustainability Leader