Environment and Sustainability Committee

Hey Kambrya College!

It's the Environment and Sustainability Committee and we have some great news. Recently, a bake sale was held by our committee to celebrate Earth Day and National Tree Day. The theme of this year for Earth Day was to 'Invest in Our Planet', and following that throughline, we held the bake sale. The overall revenue made from this bake sale would be going to a cause that the committee collaborated together to find. We finally ended up choosing to donate to making renewable energy more accessible for everyone. All together, we were able to raise a total of $154.15! We are all so happy to be able to raise this much and we would like to thank every single person who helped by buying the cupcakes from us. We could not have done it without you. So, we thank you for everything.

If you would like to get more information of where all this money is going, check out this link:  https://wwf.org.au/donate/donate-now-for-a-renewables-nation/

Thanks!

The Environment and Sustainability Committee 😊

Nossal Environmental Summit

In Week 8 of Term 3, twelve lucky environmental enthusiasts had been invited to Nossal Highschool to participate in their Flora & Fauna Environmental Summit. Many other schools were there, and it was a fantastic opportunity to meet new like-minded students from other schools. It was an informative and fun day with many fun activities planned and presentations from guest speakers.

The day had begun with a thrilling scavenger hunt, the first group to go around Nossal and locate all the special trees or plants around Nossal's school would get to win a prize! My group, which also included a few students from other schools, was the first group to win! But unfortunately, my group hadn’t done as well during flora and fauna Kahoot later in the day...

For the first presentation, a member from the City of Casey council gave us a look into what they’re doing to improve Casey’s environment and the importance of trees and canopy cover in our city. We learnt about the council's plan to improve our canopy cover from a below average 11% to a healthy 15% by 2030, as well as what we can do to support the goal of improving our canopy cover.

The second presentation was about how we can use an app on our phones called iNaturalist to identify and to record our own observations of living things so that we can generate data on our own wildlife. In fact, we even took photos of plants in Nossal's very own indigenous garden and shared them onto iNaturalist. iNaturalist is a great way that you- yes you, can contribute to helping us identify all the amazing flora and fauna in Casey.

The next educational presentation was about an interesting topic, biomimicry. It was basically about how we can learn not just about the environment but from the environment too. We learnt about many great inventions such as the Japanese bullet trains which had been inspired by nature and even got a chance to design our own nature inspired creations.

But my favorite part of the day -apart from the delicious subway catered at lunch- was when we finished the day off with a race against the other schools. We were tasked with assembling a bird feeder as fast as we could without any instructions and we had tried our very best to do it, we were so excited when we had worked out how to do it. Despite the challenging task, we finished second out of all the teams and we got to keep the two bird feeders we made! You might see them around the school!

Overall, we all very much enjoyed the flora & fauna summit and I'd like to thank Nossal for having us and a big thanks to Ms. Popa-Matieu for putting so much effort and organization into making it happen.

by Aon Dutta 

Recycling

Hey Kambrya College! We are the Environment and Sustainability Committee; responsible for ensuring that the school is as sustainable and environmentally friendly as we can possibly be.

To take us a step forward in that direction, we as a committee have put in place recycling bins around the school for special items that have a more difficult way to recycle. Namely, pens and batteries. They have some specific locations around the school and we as a committee are working to put out more bins as soon as we can. If you go to the bins, they also have the rules on what can be placed in there alongside what will be done with them. Briefly, they will be taken to Officeworks and they will safely recycle them.

Currently, this are how they are distributed:

A pen and battery recycling bin in the new senior building in front of Senior 5 and the new later years office.

A pen and battery recycling bin in the Bulen Bulen building next to the Student Voice Box on the table outside of the staff office (near the hair and beauty salon).

A pen and battery recycling bin in the Gwonawa building directly in front of the staff office.

A pen recycling bin in the Warin staff office (just ask the teachers if you want to place a pen in the bin, they'll be more than happy to help).