Green Team News

16th Annual School Sustainability Festival

Students from year 5/6 attended the 16th School Sustainability Festival on Thursday 9th September. This annual event is organised by the Port Phillip EcoCentre to provide local schools and their communities an opportunity to celebrate and acknowledge their environmental and student leadership achievements within City of Port Phillip (CoPP), Bayside City Council (BCC) and beyond.

The School Sustainability Festival is Victoria’s longest running Festival proudly celebrating student leadership and environmental action. This year’s theme was “Local Action, global impact” and it was held online with over 300 students from 15 different schools attending.

The festival included a Welcome to Country by Gheran from the Boon Wurrung Foundation, which highlighted the importance of coming with purpose. This was followed by a range of student delivered presentations. There were keynote speakers, as well as engaging presentations from EcoCentre Educators and other organisations including Roots & Shoots and Reptile Encounters.

The students interacted with an Online Learning Gallery to share ideas, thoughts and resources based on the festival’s presentations. St Kilda Park presented two workshops, ‘Gala’s Garden’ and ‘Every Small Change Makes a Big Difference.’ It was great to see some positive feedback from other students and schools who are now inspired to make their own veggie patch and act to make a difference in their own homes.

The students reflected some thoughts after the event.

Before today, I never knew…

• Relaxing in nature for 15 minutes superpowers your brain!
• Tetra Paks are not recyclable in our council recycling bins.

• There are 2000 threatened species. The growling grass frog is one of these because its habitat is segmented and there is an increase of predators such as foxes and cats
• There are only 1500 red tailed black cockatoos left in the wild because of increased logging of old growth forests

• The Mary River turtle can breathe underwater through its bottom! It is also known as the punk rock turtle. It is threatened because 90% of its eggs are eaten by foxes
• It takes 75 years for disposable nappies to decompose
• We eat nano plastics in our food especially food from the ocean equivalent to a credit card each week! (5grams)
• If you find an injured possum or other native animal, you should contact Wildlife Victoria. If a possum is hit by a car, you should do a pouch check to save the joey. https://www.wildlifevictoria.org.au/

I am now inspired to… 

• Reduce my plastic footprint
• Buy recycled toilet paper or toilet paper with bamboo fibres
• Build nesting boxes for cockatoos and possums
• Refuse plastic
• Be a wildlife ambassador
• Protect helmeted honey eaters
• Protect the koalas
• Clean up the ocean

Allison Shanahan

Sustainability Leader