Meleah’s Sustainability Challenge
Meleah Byth (Year 9) recently created a new sustainability challenge, you can read more about this inspiring challenge below:
It’s time to start collecting and recycling your soft plastics at home! Surprisingly, it is super easy!
Step one – Collect your soft plastics in a bag
Step two – Put them in a soft plastics bin located outside of coles & woolies stores (it is free!)
Your soft plastics then travel from the store to a redcycle centre, there they get munched up then melted. Finally, the melted plastic is moulded into useful items, like the seats we have at school!
Check out this video to see the recycling in action!
It is so easy yet makes such a big difference. In 2016 only 2% of the 78 million tonnes of plastic in the world was recycled. By recycling your soft plastics you are reducing fossil fuel emissions, saving animals and keeping our landfills and environment tidier.
What are soft plastics?
They are basically any scrunchable plastic! The one exception to that rule is cling wrap, it is NOT a soft plastic.
Checkout this link for a list of soft plastics
https://www.redcycle.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/REDcycle-Poster-2017_Final-1.pdf
Extension Challenge
It is time to battle the e-waste issue!
What is e-waste?
E-waste is a term used to describe electrical appliances such as toasters, batteries and mobile phones. E-waste becomes problematic when it is dumped in landfill because it contains toxic metals and lethal substances that leak out into the environment.
Across all of Australia e-waste is banned from landfill but currently only 4% of e-waste is recycled.
It is time to take action! Start collecting your e-waste for recycling!
-E-waste can be dropped off at your local recycling centre, (it sometimes comes with a cost so maybe check out their website first)
-Disposable batteries can be dropped off at Aldi or at the school library. They will then get recycled.
-Consider buying some rechargeable batteries
I hope that some of you have taken up Meleah’s sustainability challenge, I definitely did and took 2 car loads of goods to the Op shops on Saturday. My clean up happened to coincide with my 21 year old daughter moving out and 23 year old son moving home and it was a great feeling sending so much to either recycling or up cycling.
I love Meleah’s new challenge – many of you will be already doing soft plastics recycling, but you may not be recycling your e waste. I happened to include that in my cupboard cleanse and took all our old computer/phone waste (chargers, cords etc) to Officeworks where there are multiple bins. You can also recycle old pens – wish I had known about that one as well. For other e waste, you may need to contact your local council.
Congratulations Natalie Young
I wish to congratulate Natalie Young (Year 9) on being accepted into the ‘School Strike 4 Climate’ Student Climate Leadership Program – an eight week training program consisting of a weekend launch (15th & 16th of August) and weekly training sessions. (Tuesday’s or Thursday’s from 6-8pm) This is an online program open to people from the age of 12-30. Natalie received a phone call last Thursday and after a brief interview over the phone, they confirmed her place on the course. I look forward to hearing about the course once she has completed it.
Best wishes for the next lock down period and keep up the work of Green Team.
