The Environment Club at St Joseph’s Albion Park, now called the War on Waste (WOW) Club has been working hard this year to reduce the amount of waste the school is sending to landfill by introducing recycling to the school.

There has been a great group of kids and teachers helping with this initiative, giving up every Tuesday lunchtime to empty recycling bins in every classroom into the yellow bins, and helping with a number of other recycling initiatives.

We have organised mixed recycling bins in every classroom, and throughout the staffroom and offices, and have now got mixed recycling happening in the staff lunchroom and all other areas of the school (canteen, year 11 area, year 12 area, COLA, netball courts). Each fortnight, we place 10 extremely full yellow mixed recycling bins kerbside for Council pickup. That’s 2400L of waste we are preventing from going into landfill! Four more yellow bins will be arriving next week which will be placed in student playground areas so soon we will have 14 yellow recycling bins being collected each fortnight which is a lot of rubbish being diverted from landfill.

Our next project is to spray paint ‘LANDFILL’ on all the general student waste bins to remind students where their waste ends up, and encourage them to put recyclable waste in the yellow bins.

Thank you to all the staff and students who have been involved with this club and who are working hard to reduce the impact St Joseph’s has on the environment.

A video highlighting some of our work can be found at this link https://youtu.be/P0gCcQsFjuE