Student Leadership 

Environment and Sustainability 

As the increase in paper waste becomes much higher each day, we, the Environment and Sustainability Leadership Team are stepping up to make a change, to stop this. To start off, members of our team created a survey and tried to gather as much information from our students as possible. This survey included information such as, what classroom are you in, does your classroom have a recycling bin and do you believe that our school should have more recycling bins in our classrooms? 

The results of the survey revealed that a massive 86.8% of students said that we need more recycling bins in our classrooms. As well as this, students left many passionate comments on the survey such as “Mentone Girls' Secondary College should promote sustainability” and “I feel like it should be made clear which rubbish goes where, so students can learn and be conditioned to utilise that behaviour of splitting rubbish in the future… considering climate change”.

Our team has heard the voice of our school and is working to resolve this issue. Previously, our school was constantly wasting humongous amounts of printer paper by throwing it into the general waste as there were no other options available. A much better solution is to recycle it or reuse it for something else. Wasting paper is costing the lives of millions of trees, financially and environmentally. Imagine how much paper we can save by having these recycling bins!

The Environment and Sustainability Team's plan for fixing this problem is to buy more recycling bins for the school and place them in the classrooms where needed. On inspection, over half of the classrooms previously had no recycling bins. To increase the usage of these recycling bins, our team is also designing posters for these bins, indicating what can and can’t be recycled. These posters will not only help students and teachers figure out what can be recycled and what can’t, but will also educate everyone more about recycling in general.

Tilde Verhoeven (Year 11) 

for Environment and Sustainability team 

International Friendship Day

In recognition of International Friendship Day on Wednesday 9 June, the Junior Leadership team invited year 7 and 8 students to wear yellow - the colour of friendship - make connections with messages to old and new friends and join in a lunchtime Kahoot with a 'Best Friends' theme.