Rubicon recycling Challenge 2012

Background: Rubicon Outdoor Centre is a residential outdoor school run by the Victorian Education Department, with a campus at Rubicon and one at Nayook. Our students are sourced from schools around Victoria and usually stay for 5 days undertaking a program including outdoor education and sustainability education.

Aims: To increase student awareness of how to classify and sort recycling, compost and rubbish at the source through personal experience.

To increase student awareness of the benefits associated with recycling and composting

To reduce the amount of student generated rubbish that goes to landfill from our School.

We have set up a number of recycling centres around the school that have clear signage and consistent containers with a 240 litre yellow lidded wheelie bin for recycling, a 60 litre black round rubbish bin for rubbish and a smaller black tub for compost material. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1. Recycling Centre

At the beginning of the week visiting students are briefed on the location of these centres and how to use them. Individual small rubbish bins have been removed from each dormitory room so that students are presented with the option of the three different bins when they go to dispose of their rubbish. At the final Friday BBQ lunch the three different classes of waste are weighed and a discussion about the merits of recycling and composting is facilitated with the students. As we have a different sized student group each week we calculate how much compost, recycling and rubbish has been produced per student for the week. These figures are compared with the figures from the schools who have visited Rubicon in previous weeks. After the weigh-in the compost is emptied into our rotating compost bins (Fig. 2.) and once the composting process has taken place it is then used on the vegie garden (Fig. 3) which produces vegetables and herbs for the kitchen.

Fig. 2. Compost Bins

Fig. 3 Veggie Garden