Inspired by ABCTV’s War on Waste, Year 4’s gardening club and the Eco Leadership Team have teamed up to tackle food waste on the Primary Campus.
After setting up a compost bin and a worm farm, the teams began educating the each of the classes about the positive effect of recycling food waste. With the teachers’ support, each class began to deposit their food waste into a special bin which has been collected and weighed at the end of each lunch break.
To date, we have recycled 84kg of food waste over six weeks. This, in turn, makes an average of 14kg per week of food waste we are now composting instead of sending to landfill.
“Each week the average Australian family throws out 20% of the food they buy, that’s one in every five bags of groceries. This adds up to 3.3million tonnes of food a year, enough to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground six times over.
- Food waste accounts for around 40% of the average Australian household’s rubbish bin and if it isn’t composted, and most of it isn’t, it produces methane gas which has a 25 times stronger impact on the environment than carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas baddy, but methane is a despicable villain and our heroic worms can wriggle to the rescue. Hence, our Eco Worm Farm!
- The lowly soon-to-be-super-hero-rock star worm loves to eat your food waste and turn it into rich nutrients to feed plants. So as well as recycling these nutrients, the load of the garbage truck will be lightened by 120kg a year (the average amount of food waste for Australian households) and that despicable villain methane isn’t released into the atmosphere.”
Andy Marks, War on Waste Outreach Producer
(http://about.abc.net.au/war-on-waste-let-the-worms-rock-your-world/)
Along with the War on Waste, the Gardening Club and Eco Leadership Team have begun to the use the compost to plant and grow some herbs and flowers outside the Year 4 classrooms.
Future plans involve creating a sustainable and eatable vegetable garden for the school community to enjoy.
Stay tuned to hear about our next War on Waste – War on Plastic Bags!
