This year we focussed on reducing our waste. Some new things we did which worked quite well were:

• Replaced our food waste collection bins with new clearly-labelled pink mini-wheelie bins across the school.
• Created some new worm farms. The worm juice is used on our Preps Organic Vegie patch. What is left over is sold to raise funds for the Vegie patch.
• Replaced all our co-mingled recycling bins across the whole school with green mini-wheelie bins. We saw a big increase in the rate of recycling.
• Removed the rubbish bins from some classrooms in the Senior School, and just left the paper recycling bins in place. We replaced the multiple small bins (and bin bags!) in the classrooms with just one big bin in nearby open areas, alongside a co-mingled recycling bin. We reduced our plastic bag use by doing this. This will be rolled out to other parts of the school next year.
• We conducted awareness-raising assemblies to remind everyone what, how and why to recycle and why to reduce waste.
• We entered the RSS Rubbish Free Lunch Challenge, and everyone in the school from the Kindergarten to the Year 12s was involved.

Over the year, we saw a 12% decrease in our waste going to landfill!