Sustainability at Trinity

Welcome everyone to 2023! The new school year brings excitement, new classes for our students and with it, new school materials, refurbished classrooms and enthusiasm to succeed in many ways throughout this year.

The school grounds are clean and ready to host our students again. With this fresh start comes another bunch of everyday, achievable opportunities to make a positive difference in our everyday environment.

This year amongst other initiatives, the sustainability focus will be on the expansion of our paper and cardboard recycling bins and continuing to encourage the uptake of Nude Food and Litter-Less Lunches (a new term that I will be embracing).

Last year we implemented a new process for recycling paper and cardboard at Trinity, having classroom-sized blue bins placed in the Tuck and Mercy Wings and larger 660L blue wheelie bins at the entrance way to these areas.

Appropriate materials were placed into the smaller bins, emptied into the larger wheelie bins and then collected by a formal paper recycling company. In the last two weeks of school for 2022 alone, with students and staff cleaning up our learning environments and cleaning out items to make way for 2023, we filled at least 6 x 660L paper and cardboard wheelie bins.

This action of separating paper materials from others and identifying books, posters, planners, worksheets, boxes and more as recyclable items diverted at least 3960L of ‘rubbish’ from landfill.

I have been extremely pleased with the students' proper use of this system throughout 2022 and this has allowed us to roll out a whole school expansion of the paper and cardboard recycling process in 2023.

I am very excited that we will soon have classroom-sized bins in every classroom, in areas shared between year levels and many staff offices too. In addition, a large 660L wheelie bin will be located at each wing of the school, providing quick access for every person in the school to recycle their paper and cardboard.

We will continue to monitor the success of this process, iron out any challenges that may occur and I look forward to being able to report back on Trinity’s paper recycling efforts in future newsletters.

In 2022 we held our first ‘Nude Food’ days, where students and staff were encouraged to bring food items on that day free or single-use packaging. At times our school yard becomes littered with rubbish, single-use plastic wraps and single-use packaging is strewn across our yard; wedged into the cracks between outdoor seating, tied around the wiring of the Oval fence, scrunched underneath plants and tossed into the gardens.

While I would like to think that our environment presents in a clean and cared for manner all of the time, this is not always the case. Litter at Trinity and the amount of waste that we produce as a large group of people is a huge issue. The majority of our students do actively seek to do the right thing, utilsing bins placed around the yard, limiting the rubbish that they bring to school or taking their rubbish home again so that it does not end up accidently littered around our school.

The majority of Trinity students do care for and show respect to our environment. But it is important to identify challenges and work towards better care of our common home. For this reason, we will continue and grow our focus on Nude Food and Litter-Less Lunches throughout 2023.

Each term we will select a particular day to hold a Nude Food event, where we can involve students in experiences that will hopefully see an increase in re-usable packaging and sustainable alternatives to single-use plastics.

There will be prizes on offer and activities to participate in. Together with the promotion of Litter-Less Lunches on a more regular basis, we are hoping that these initiatives are ones that students and families can embrace more than just once a term.

While actions of omitting single-use packaging completely is best practice, we know that realistically this is not always possible. New habits take time and planning, and life is hectic at the best of times.

But with continued trying, the cementing of good habits is possible. And above all we want to push the message that any positive action, even if small, is better than none.

The efforts of removing just one piece of single-use plastic from our student lunchboxes is still a better outcome for our environment than no action at all. Most of you will be familiar with Australia’s soft plastic recycling catastrophe; the latest chapter in this ongoing saga being the NSW Environmental Protection Agency ordering the dump of three and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of soft plastic into landfill, following the collapse of Australia’s largest soft plastic recycler REDcycle.

While the soft plastics scenario is complex and involves many parties, this outcome surely creates concern and stirs want for greater action for a world without single- use plastics. And this starts with us, our efforts to reduce and reuse wherever we can.

Sarah Glennen