100 Bags of Rubbish

The students of the Motueka Steiner School were in a mood of celebration on Wednesday, 11 December as they collected a final 20 bags of rubbish, to make a grand total of 100 this year, close to one tonne of rubbish!

At the beginning of the year, the senior students of the school set themselves the task of removing 100 bags of rubbish from the local Estuary.

“They are concerned with the impact this rubbish has on our marine environment and wanted to do something about it,” says Margot Dhondt, class 8 teacher.

It has taken a consistent effort and many outings to the Estuary to get this rubbish and in the end the older students enlisted the help of the rest of the school. On the day of the final collection, about 80 children set off with teachers and helpers and scoured the Estuary for every piece of plastic they could find. This rub- bish included; discarded tyres, corrugated iron, glass, polystyrene, tree protectors, plastic bottles, lollipop sticks and general household waste.

“Picking up rubbish was surprisingly fun and it felt great removing it from the waterways” say the students.

The “100 Bags of Rubbish Project” was initiated by the students as part of worldwide celebrations to mark the centenary of Steiner Education. Rudolf Steiner was an intellectual in Austria at the turn of the Century. Exactly

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100 years ago he created the first Steiner or Waldorf School in the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart Germany. In 2019, there are over 1,000 Steiner/Waldorf Schools in the world and all of them have taken time in 2019 to celebrate this mile-

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The children would like to thank their mentors, especially Jude and Mel from the White Bait Connection as well as the TDC who picked up the rubbish from the school.