No Waste Wednesdays: a great green success story

As a 5 Star Resource Smart school, our school has been hard at work growing and embedding its commitment to sustainability in the curriculum, on campus and in the community.

During 2019 we established our kitchen garden program and spent time exploring the concept and importance of composting.

Our students were highly engaged in the discussions and activities, so we were keen to work out a way to continue the good green work at home.

Working with our wonderful parent sustainability team, we came up with the concept of No Waste Wednesday encouraging students and families to bring in food scraps from home and reduce their organic waste. Families are given a bucket for their food scraps and they bring them to school every Wednesday for composting.

Since starting in August, last year we collected over 1,100kg of food scraps and reached around 25% of the school signed up to the program and bringing in scraps every Wednesday.

Since returning back to school, we have collected over 150kg in just 3 weeks. This includes all of the coffee grounds that we collect from the fabulous Little Sunflower Cafe nearby in Ormond Road.

The program has been a great green success, with new families signing up each week and our compost bins hard at work!

An awesome effort to all the families participating in 'No Waste Wednesdays' and to Anna, Susan and Laura for helping our school families and teachers reduce their organics waste one bucket at a time!

Just a reminder that we can compost all of your fruit and veg scraps, coffee grounds and egg shells, but please no meat, dairy or fish as these tend to attract pests. The smaller you cut up your food scraps, the quicker it will turn into compost for our garden, so if you have some bigger pieces of fruit or veggies it would be helpful to chop them into smaller pieces.

If you would like to volunteer to help out on Wednesday morning's collecting and weighing food scraps and turning compost bins, please contact Miss Young as we are always happy for extra helpers.