Waste Wise

Over the past few years we have set up a rubbish bin system so all our waste is sorted into chook scraps, compost, recycling and rubbish. This takes a huge commitment from the staff to continually remind students about where to put different types of rubbish and why. We are also very grateful to the parents who wash rubbish bins, take the chook scraps for their chickens, turn the compost and even sort rubbish that has gone into the wrong bins. It is truly a whole community effort and well worth it, we believe.

We had a visit from a Wastewise representative, who talked with the students and staff about the significance of waste and what we do with it, gave us information like what types of plastics can be recycled and performed a waste audit of our bins after lunch. The older children graphed the results.

Types of rubbish

Recyclable waste

Recyclable rubbish

Waste audit

In 2006 we revisited the Regional Resource Recovery Centre, which serves the councils of Melville, Cockburn and Fremantle, where we live.

Here's us walking into the Materials Recovery Facility

The three processes carried out at the RRRC are:

  1. Mulching green waste from verge pickups (or take your green waste there).
  2. Recycling resources from our yellow topped bins, which are shipped to factories in Australia and overseas to be made into new products, saving money and natural resources and helping change habits and attitudes of consumers.
  3. Making compost from everything in the green topped bins. Glass reduces the quality, so never put glass in your green topped bin!! Even broken or dirty glass should go in the yellow topped bin.

This pile of 'recyclable resources' was collected in about one day and that is not a toy truck.

Think about how we can reduce our production of waste.

Refuse Reuse

These people are collecting glass. Plastic bottles with liquid in are heavy and part of the sorting process is based on weight. Empty all plastic bottles or they will end up on this conveyor belt and will go to landfill.

After initial sorting, everything in your green topped bin goes into these huge long green drums for three days. They rotate and turn it into compost.

All this compost is filtered to remove plastic bags, metal and other bits and pieces, then it goes to local farms and market gardens to help put nutrients back in the soil and save water.

This piece of art (among many) was made entirely from waste products, notably rolled up plastic shopping bags.

Plastic shopping bags cannot be recycled and need to be filtered out of the compost. Take calico bags, use boxes, whatever, but say no to plastic bags.

 

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