THE GREEN PAGE

A big warm welcome to 

'The Green Page'

The Green Page is an opportunity for the students and staff of the school to showcase their ever growing commitment to a more sustainable future. It will highlight the great efforts made by members of the school, innovation in sustainability, and helpful hints and tips for you to be a better steward of the earth.

Our first article introduces ‘The Green Team’, a student and teacher initiative in school's recycling.  A committed and keen group of SRC students and likeminded staff have banded together and formed a ‘Green Team’, to highlight and tackle different sustainability issues around the school. Their main focus for this year is to look at the schools recycling. The team is building on from data collected last year and working with the existing enthusiasm of the students to initiate a program school wide!!

The Green Team conducted a recycling audit last week with the spotlight on the VCE student’s waste. Collecting, sorting and measuring their waste to gain firm data on the volume of rubbish, recycling and compost that could be collected. Ualani Miller one of the team member reports on the process:

Last week the newly established ‘Green Team’(a subcommittee of the student representative council) conducted a waste management audit in the VCE Hall. This was to see the quantity and different types of rubbish we produce as a sub school. We set up 4 different bins at two different locations within the VCE area; Paper & Cardboard, Food Scraps for compost, General Waste and General Recycling.

At the end of each day, we gloved up and sifted through all the bins in the area to weigh and measure the amount of rubbish we made. The results were staggering. With averages worked out to represent the school student community, annually we produce;

• 1908kg or 54,752ltr volume of Co-mingled recycling
• 2,632kg or 52,480ltr volume of General waste
• 784kg or 29,900ltr volume of Paper and Cardboard recycling
• 6,660kg or 2,483ltr volume of Food Scraps

I must admit I was not prepared for the smell!! However, I did not realise that the most disgusting thing would be the amount of general waste in the recycling bin, plastics in the compost and paper in the general waste. The circumstances of how these things got into the wrong bins is questionable, I mean, it can be agreed that teenagers are not the most motivated, so perhaps they just threw it across the room at any which bin with no respect for science or consideration to the people sifting through it later that day.

Or maybe they didn’t know which one to put it in? Personally, I identify as an environmentalist, when others try to stereotype me. However, as I sifted through the bins with my very brave team, I realised I had no idea whether you can recycle coffee cups, if you can compost orange peel or if paper bags can be put in the paper and cardboard bin? It quickly became clear that we do not know as much as we need to in order to recycle appropriately.

From a study, I did last year I know that 93.3% of you recycle at home, so I encourage you to have a look at what goes in each bin and teach your kids to do the same.

A big thank-you to all the VCE’s who participated in our audit last week as well as the innocent bi-standers who I roped into helping me sift through it throughout the week.  

Ualani Miller

A special thanks to all those that helped, in particular the students that make up the Green Team and those that jumped in to get the dirty work done; Ualani Miller, Taylor Fergus, Matthew Musilli, Tegan Eggleton, Olivia Hackett, Charley Kitto, Will Pleming to name a few.

Ualani Miller has provided some detailed graphs developed by keen students last year showing statistics on attitude and trends across the student population towards recycling: 

So where to from here?

The Green Team will continue to meet weekly and to answer all the questions this project has brought up, plus go on to gather more data and content to develop an action plan on introducing recycling into the school.

Stay tuned for more!

Greenest Regards

Peter Ross  and The Green Team