St Benedicts supporting National Recycling Week

The theme for this years’ Planet Ark National Recycling week is ‘Recovery - A future beyond the Bin’.  This has been a part of our activities this week at school. Our students have enjoyed a visit from the Townsville CIty Council Waste and Water Educator Ashlee to talk all things recycling. Our ¾ Emu’s have also shared an informative presentation at Assembly, sharing insights from a recent school waste audit to inspire their peers toward making a more conscious effort to ensure all of our waste sorting options are used correctly. 

As you may already know, here at St Benedicts we sort our waste in the following categories:

• Purple Bins - General Waste

• Yellow lids - Comingled recycling such as paper, cardboard, tin, recyclable plastics

• Blue Bins - Containers for Change collections 

• Scrap BIns - Food waste from students as well as the staffroom and tuckshop

• Soft Plastics - Collected in staffroom from tuckshop, administration and staffroom. 

• St VInnies collection in our recycling centre in the carpark. 

• Battery World Collection in the office. 

• Plastic Bottle lids

• Bread Tags for Wheelchairs

• Metal Lids and ring pulls 

All of these efforts are to help reduce our unnecessary contribution to landfil and raise awareness within our community of our environmental footprint.

If you would like to support our efforts at the school and help your children to understand how they can contribute to our rubbish and its ‘future beyond the bin’ it would  be wonderful if students engaged in their families’ recycling at home.    

One of our greatest challenges here at school is contamination of waste streams, with scraps put into recycling bins for example, or containers not being rinsed before recycling. 

We would love it if you help us! By simply encouraging your children to rinse containers at home before placing in your home recycling bin, it will instill understanding and will help them learn by familiarity and repetition. What is good for your bins, is good for ours too!.

We learn about recycling all year and do our best to support a sense of stewardship and personal responsibility and contribution in students of all year levels.  Even our youngest students can get involved . 

Feel free to share your recycling tips and pics with our school community via the parents facebook community too!, we would love to see what you are up to.

We hope that National Recycling Week will help to inspire our community to consciously Recycle, Repurpose and Reuse, especially with the silly spending season right around the corner. 

Happy Recycling!!