New initiatives, such as ‘Trash Free Tuesday’ and ‘Envirobank return and earn scheme’ have contributed greatly towards setting the pace for a cleaner environment within St Edward’s and other local schools. There has been a noticeable increase in staff and students responding to environmental issues within the community, and there has been a noticeable change in attitude toward the way we, as a community, care for our environment.

During Term 2, St Edward’s has seen a steady incline of student and staff participation in ‘Trash Free Tuesdays’, an initiative to encourage students to bring a reusable lunchbox, with no disposable items. The initiative started with only 12% of students participating, it has however risen to 20% of the school bringing no disposable plastics every Tuesday over the past 8 weeks, with 31 students consistently bringing a trash free lunch box every week, which eliminates the chance that 1000’s of pieces of plastics end up in our pristine environment every week.  The environment portfolio is working to increase this percentage and encourage more staff and students to care for our environment.  Our aim is for 300 students to bring a trash free lunch box each week for Term 3.

The ‘Envirobank return and earn scheme’ has diverted a total 4559 bottles from going to landfill.  This is a great improvement to our environment over the term, with the funds collected from the scheme used to help future initiatives.  Many of these bottles were collected by 15 students, who handed in their orange Return and Earn bags filled with containers in exchange for Waterford hours and working towards the Tatham Award.

At the start of the term, St Edward’s installed a water fountain and bottle re-filler to reduce the waste contributed by water bottles, and through this initiative, we have helped remove 3570 bottles from our environment.  Most students are now bringing in reusable water bottles.

It has been exciting to be a part of the environment portfolio at a time when the College is moving to a greener future.

Lars Cleeren, Year 11
Environment Portfolio Member