Minimising our waste in MANY ways!

We are passionate about reducing our waste to LANDFILL! 

Today we we watched the awesome 'Savvy & the Stolen Recycling' show by A Fool's Company. 

The play was really funny and a great reminder to recycle...

* HARD plastic with 1 - 2 - 5 on it  and plastic bottles

* Cans

* Glass

* Cardboard - like pizza boxes

Another way we are reducing our waste is by trying hard to have a wrapper free lunch. 

It has been great to see some students who, back in term 1, found this a challenge and have now started having a wrapper free lunch every day! 

💚 lots of healthy fruit and food bought in bulk

💚More fruit and popcorn and chips from a BIG packet

💚Mandarins, grapes and treats from BIG bulk packets 

We also have some enviro superstars that have set up their own 'rubbish patrol' at lunchtime! 

Well done Eden, Annie, Kimberley and team! 

Waste Minimisation: Waste Audit

Our school is committed to reducing our waste. 

Every year we do two WASTE AUDITS to check how we are going with putting rubbish in the right bin and thinking of ways to reduce what we are putting in the red landfill bins. 

We collected the landfill rubbish from ALL areas of the school over 6 days. 

We had teams that sorted some at a time:  

- Kea classes (year 0 / 1/ 2) 

- Tui classes  (year 3 / 4 5/ 6) 

- Hall bins

- Staff bins

These items should have been kept for soft plastic recycling

These things should have been put into the green compost bins 

These things should have been put into the yellow recycle bins 

These things were put in the right bin - they have to go to landfill 

We found out that:

> We collected 17.0 kg of waste from the landfill bins.

> This was more than last waste audit (back in March) but we now have another class and we had some playdough which weighed A LOT! We also counted paper towels from the staff areas this time and we didn't include that last time. 

> 45% of the rubbish should have been recycled or composted.  This is about the same as last time. 

> Collecting old, broken pens for our 'special recycling' project was a good idea as the box is now full! 

Three areas we need to keep working on are:

1) Soft plastic - reducing the amount of plastic lunchbox wrappers we see at school.  These are always a problem - blowing around outside and ending up in the food scrap bins! 

2) Paper Towels - in some school areas we seem to use a lot - we can't compost that many! Can we reduce how many we are using? 

3) Paper - some paper is ended up in landfill and we are also using a lot of paper. How can we reduce this? 

2025 Enviro Challenge

 This year, we have a brand new challenge to ALL the classes... 

become the ultimate 

ENVIROSCHOOLS CLASS! 

This new challenge links in with our waste minimisation focus.

Classes earn points for :

* Being wrapper free

* Making sure rubbish is in the correct coloured bins for our weekly check

* Picking up rubbish 

 

When a class has earned 50 points they have reached BRONZE level. They receive a class certificate in assembly and a small reward.  Nearly ALL classes school wide have already earned this status! 

Each class voted on a suitable reward, most classes chose ice cream. 

The next challenge is to earn 100 points - silver level. 

Congratulations to Room 7, 6, and 1 that have ALREADY reached this level! 

Some enviro students wrote and shared a play in assembly to promote this initiative further. 

Great work Aira, Myra, Lyla and Kimberly! 

Rubbish Relays!

We have been thinking about all the rubbish that has to go in the red bins. 

We played a game where we made a 'rubbish rainbow'.

We were in teams and one person had to run and grab an (old, broken) pen and put it into our red hoop.

Then the next person in our team went and grabbed a different colour pen - we arranged them to make a colourful rainbow.  There were a lot of pens! We talked about how we could reduce the amount of pens that are going in the red landfill bin. 

Afterwards we did the same relay activity but used soft plastic instead. We realised there was still quite a bit of wrappers around our school. 

The following week, we had a visitor called Penelope from Beautification Trust.   She talked to us about what should go into each bin and WHY.  

We did a really fun relay activity where we had to grab some rubbish from a bag and then run to the front and put it into the correct coloured bin; 

red for landfill

yellow for recycling

green for composting

What did we learn? 

* That tetra pak is made from plastic, metal and cardboard (and has to go into landfill or special recycling) (Mikayla)

* The paper straws are just as bad as plastic straws and can't be recycled as they are lined with plastic.  (Mahi) 

That wooden cutlery can be recycled  (Angie) 

Waste Audit Term 4 2024

Recently we conducted a waste audit. 

We collected all the red landfill bins from around the school and poured them into piles. 

Then we sorted the rubbish to see what should have been in the recycle bin (yellow), 

compost bin (green) or in soft plastic recycling. 

  

Things in landfill break down very slowly and produce poisonous methane gas. 

The landfills in Auckland and getting bigger and bigger every day. 

We need to try and recycle things or make them into compost instead of just burying them in the ground. 

These things should have been in the recycle bins: 

 

 

 These things should have been in the green compost bins: 

. 

 

Here are some of the things that should have been in soft plastic recycling. 

. 

.

This is some examples of things that were correctly placed into the red landfill bins: 

 

How many pens can you count? 

                              

We also checked the huge landfill bin in the car park to see what else might have been put directly in there. 

We found... 

These are just 2 of the 4 or 5 bags that were mostly full of paper towels.
We were wondering where they all came from! 

The Results! 

This data is for ALL school areas for 5 days worth of rubbish. 

* Amount that should've been composted: 1.32kg 

* Amount that should've been recycled: 1.51kg

* Amount that should've been put into soft plastic recycling:  0.41kg

* Amount that was correctly placed in the landfill bins: 3.56kg

TOTAL waste: 6.8kg for 5 days. 

Amount that was in the wrong bin: 3.24kg (48%) 

(that is NOT including all the paper towels we found afterwards) 

Positives: 

💚 This works out an average of 1.36kg a day that we are putting into the landfill bins 

- our best ever result! 

💚 We are now seeing less lunchbox wrappers in the bins compared to last time. 

💚 Some classes are now EXPERTS at recycling - Room 5/6/7/8 had only ONE recyclable 

item incorrectly placed in the landfill bin! Ka Pai! 

What Next? 

 P1. Paper Towels

Reminders to all staff & classes to put paper towels in the compost bins. 

We will also research ways to reduce the amount of paper towels we are putting into 

the landfill bin each week.

P2. Soft Plastic 

This appears to be mainly packaging from teacher resources. 

We need to come up with a plan for how we can collect this soft plastic & recycle it. 

P3. Pens 

We want to have less stationery (pens) going to landfill. 

We will research what other schools have done.

We'll make some containers for all classroom to put old broken pens (& batteries) into. 

P4. Recycling- Paper

Reminders to all staff & classes to put paper in the recycle bins. 

Traffic Light Bins - get it right and WIN!

 We are now a few weeks into term 1 and already have started some awesome enviro projects! 

We have started the year by revisiting the 'TRAFFIC LIGHT BINS' that all classes have and reminding them what goes into each bin. This is useful, especially now that all local households have a green food scraps bin and there is now new recycling rules. 

Each week monitors check classroom bins and give out scores  / 6 for bins that have the correct things in them. The classes with the highest score at the end of term WINS free lunch - either pizza or fish and chips! 

Delicious prize up for grabs! 

Pizza! Yummo!

Watch this space to see how classes are doing! 

Less to Landfill - learning where our waste should go!

LATEST UPDATE... Colour Run and Family Fun Night 

All year we have been focusing on putting things in the right bin and trying to have less in the red landfill bin. 

To finish off the year we had a Family Fun Night and Colour Run event.

At this event we had an enviro stall. 

We were selling the following 'zero waste' items: 

* lunchboxes, 

* honey wraps, 

* baking jar mixes and 

* fresh veggies from the school garden, 

We also had a game where you had to sort 12 rubbish items into the correct coloured bin: 

RED - landfill - mainly broken things or things made from mixed materials like coffee cups,

YELLOW - recyclables - paper, card, drinks can and a plastic bottle,

GREEN - compostables - food scraps and napkins, 

BLUE - other items that shouldn't go in the landfill - like e waste (batteries) and soft plastic. 

If you scored 10 or higher in the game you won prizes! These were books, cookies and 2nd hand toys.

We collected ALL the rubbish from this event and had:

Total waste collected = 23.04kg (from ALL the 4 bins) 

Waste diverted from landfill = 16.68kg (everything from the yellow / green and soft plastic bin) 

Four students helped check, photograph and weigh the rubbish from this event.

The rubbish was in four different bins: landfill, recycling, soft plastic and compostable. 

 What we noticed was...

'There's a lot of coffee cups in the landfill bag' 

'Wow! We are doing a lot of recycling'

' My bag is very light (green)'

' This (soft plastic bag) looks like the lolly shop!'

To date we have now collected 168.97kg of waste since we began our records (September 2020) 

We have saved 137.79kg from being buried in the landfill. 

We thought about how we could ask food truck companies what packaging they use and ask them to investigate more environmentally friendly packaging - like more in cardboard which we can compost. We also wondered if, as we only invite out school community if it would be possible for families to bring their OWN containers and receive a discount.  

There was a LOT of recycling! 

Mainly tissues and napkins 

LOTS of coffee cups and plastic lined food containers