3 minute read
Sustainability
Isabelle Jimenez, Rose Tate and Tess Rickard, Year 12
ENVIRONMENT CAPTAINS’ REPORT
Our goal as the 2021 Environment Captains was to reduce waste. Throughout the year we implemented environmental initiatives for our school community as a chance to take action and reduce waste.
Keep Cups
As Australians use 2.7 million disposable coffee cups a day and nearly 1 billion a year, we decided to bring back the Keep Cups for the canteen, as coffee cups are single use and lined with plastic which makes them non-recyclable and therefore destined for landfill. Keep Cups are an amazing solution to both environmental issues surrounding the excessive usage of non-recyclable items and waste entering our environment. We also worked closely with executive staff to remove the sale of single use plastic water bottles at all school canteens.
RITE Website
We decided to create the RITE website as a result of Australia sending 85 per cent of the textiles we buy to landfills each year. This website allowed girls to upload clothing items to sell, with girls being able to buy the items on offer. This secondhand clothing store helped to reduce the amount of textiles waste being sent to landfills.
Afternoon Tea
In Term 4 2020 we hosted an afternoon tea with environmental student representatives from Ravenswood School for Girls, Abbotsleigh School, Barker College, Saint Ignatius’ College Riverview, Knox Grammar School, Saint Aloysius’ College, Loreto Normanhurst and Roseville College. We spent the afternoon having conversations about the importance of reducing waste and brainstorming ideas for our schools and how we could collaborate on them. We discussed a range of initiatives with the highlights being school composting, solar panels and potential partnerships with companies such as Sydney Water to reduce our water wastage. This acted as a starting point to the strategies we developed over the holiday break and allowed us to form connections that we drew on throughout the year.
Back Row: Georgia Stuart, Year 10, Isharah Hewavitharana, Year 11, Rose Tate, Year 12, Tess Rickard, Year 12, Imogen Hawkins, Year 9, Sabrina Cooke, Year 8, Rebecca Zhao, Year 8, Emily Abadee, Year 8, Amarley Bron, Year 10, Elise Djerrkura, Year 10, Phoebe Paleologos, Year 8 Front Row: Ella van Horen, Year 8, Freya Carmody, Year 10, Kyana Cvetkovic, Year 11, Giselle Kawane, Year 9, Aspen Moore, Year 9, Jade Yang, Year 10, Senu Edirisinghe, Year 10
Sustainability
School Strike for Climate
Later in the year, we were given the incredible opportunity to attend the School Strike for Climate with Reverend Bent with a number of girls from each year. This was an inspiring experience for us as we were blown away by the sheer number of people attending the rally. More than 10,000 people attended and each person shared our passion for the environment and sustainability. When we arrived, we gathered at Town Hall with the thousands of other students and listened to speeches from a wide range of inspiring people, including youth activists and an ex-coal miner who passionately advocated the need for renewable energy. All the speakers vehemently condemned the recent decision by the government to spend $600 million on a new gas plant in Kurri Kurri, instead proposing this money should be invested into developing reliable renewable energy sources for our future.
We then started the march through the city, shouting chants including, “System change not climate change” and “What do we want? Climate action. When do we want it? Now!” It was such a great experience to march with all these passionate people and see all the people in the buildings and cars stop what they were doing to watch us march. It really felt like we were doing something important and that our voices were being heard. We finished the march at St James Park and then gathered into groups to spell out our key message: ‘Fund Our Future, Not Gas’.
Tess Rickard and Rose Tate, Captains of the Environment
Elise Djerrkura, Amarley Bron, Year 10 and Miss Nikki Kiddle (Indigenous Student Education Co-ordinator)
