At Bundaberg West State School, our Green Team has aimed to reduce the amount of rubbish in our school grounds. We started the year with a campaign called “Bitter about Litter”.
Here is an outline of what we have done this year –
- We did an audit of the rubbish in our school by emptying bins and sorting the rubbish. We tallied the rubbish and found that most of it was plastic; including lunch wrap, bags, straw covers and food packets.
- We mapped the areas where most rubbish is found in the school and wrote a letter to the principal and the groundsman to tell them about our findings. The groundsman had some extra bins which he moved to the locations we discovered. It was our job to make sure the bins were in place each Monday.
- We installed some discs from the council which read “This drain leads to a waterway” next to all the drains in the school.
- We held three Nude Food days, and gave out 5 prizes of $5 tuckshop vouchers on each Nude Food day.
- We made surprise visits to the lunch areas at lunch time and rewarded kids who are using the rubbish bins correctly and had Nude Food with stickers. Photos of our “Waste Watchers” were put in our school newsletter.
We still have rubbish around our school because many children are still littering at lunch times. Only a few children bring Nude lunches, with no rubbish, so this means that we still need to do a lot more to try to stop littering at school, as well as rubbish in lunch boxes.
Battling the rubbish at school is a never-ending job! One or two reminders are not enough. We need to constantly remind students in our school that almost all of the rubbish that doesn’t go into bins ends up in the sea eventually. We’re on a constant mission to try to convince people at our school that they can do lots of things to reduce the amount of rubbish at home…. at school….everywhere.
West State school has been involved in two Tangaroa Blue sponsored beach clean-ups in conjunction with the Gidarjil Rangers this year. We spent the morning collecting rubbish from one of local beaches. The beach was marked into sections. After a safety talk, we used gloves and grabbers to pick up the rubbish.
Bamboo sticks made it easier to move the sand so we could find the tiniest pieces. We were amazed at the amount of rubbish we found, even though the beach appeared to be clean. We helped to sort and record the contents of our rubbish bags, and weigh them.
We feel proud to have been able to help Heidi and Tangaroa Blue.
We can continue to help by being persistent about reducing the amount of rubbish at our school, and making sure that every piece of rubbish goes into a bin.
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