Environment and Sustainability

Welcome back to the wonderful natural environment of Gardenvale Primary School in 2024. The birds are singing, our yabbies and fish are swimming, our plants are enjoying the summer rain and our earthworms are enjoying the fruit and vegie food scraps with the return of humans.

We did a Golden Lunchbox poll in Year 6 last week and more than 85% of our students were absolutely rubbish free every day of last week. This is a good start to the year.

SCHOOL FOOD is NOT PARTY FOOD and we expect children to bring healthy rubbish-free snacks and rubbish-free lunch to school. If any single-use food packaging comes to school, it must return home in the student’s school bag that day. As with previous years, Zest will cater for rubbish-free lunch orders every day of the week except Fridays. 

You will also notice a wonderful new change this year. Students may only drink water at school, unless a special occasion is organised by staff at school (eg. making herbal tea in a gardening club activity). Zest have removed drinks from their lunch-order menu as we refuse to have drinks such as ice-tea that come in single-use plastic bottles. It is a fabulous new initiative and something we have been building towards, with discussions between students/staff/parents for a few years now.

Let’s keep doing all we can to give our children optimism that plastics don’t poison our planet as much in the future. 

Yours in Ed

Tim McRae (Environment and Sustainability co-ordinator at GPS)