Let's Explore How You Can Make A Difference In Your School

Can we make a difference to the environment? The answer is definitely yes!

A great place to start is in your school community. There are many ways in which you can contribute to the environment such as building a worm farm, planting a tree and using paper and water wisely.

The ‘challenge' is two fold.

The first challenge is to initiate a recycling project in your School and make sure it is ongoing and sustainable. This means gaining a collective knowledge on how to run the project that will survive staff and student turnover.

The second part of the challenge is to reduce your Schools' amount of waste that is going to landfill and increase the amount of recycled materials. In order to report the materials reduced and recycled, tools are offered on how to measure and reflect these reductions in the classroom so students can see the impact their efforts are having.

The ‘Triple Bin' system refers to the three colours often seen for recycling (for example; Red for Rubbish, Yellow for Plastic and Aluminium Containers, Blue for Paper). Emphasising the colour system is a fun way for children to learn and adopt recycling behaviours. There is no strict rule for which colours go with which waste product or even limiting your challenge to three bins.

Clean Up Australia encourages schools to also recycle organics within their school through compost or worm farms. Bold colours to distinguish rubbish from recyclables are used throughout Australia in the home (kerbside recycling) and in some public spaces (public place recycling). It is natural that we should encourage the same systems in schools.

For more information please visit www.cleanup.org.au

Triple Bin Challenge Lesson Plan and Activity Sheet (1122.82kb)