Waste Busters – St Patrick’s Primary School

St Patrick’s Primary School have a brilliant bunch of students who are taking on the challenge of reducing waste at school called the Waste Busters! They completed a waste audit of their playground landfill bin on the 15th September, 2020.

They discovered that there were lots of soft plastics coming to school as well as lots of food scraps ending up in the landfill bin. They then completed the action planning workshop with BEEC and came up with loads of great ideas to reduce the waste going to landfill from the school.

What are the Waste Busters going to do to reduce the amount of waste to landfill at their school?

• Provide FOGO bins for organic waste at lunch time
• Have kitchen caddies in all classrooms
• Create posters and signage for their FOGO bins
• Introduce Bin Monitors for the FOGO bins
• Start a FOGO media campaign – ‘Who you gonna call….Waste Busters!!’
• Conduct Kahoot! FOGO quizzes with prizes for students
• Create FOGO Board games for all year levels
• Create and present FOGO skits to classes

Currently 53% (by number) or 57% (by weight) of the waste in their landfill bin is organic waste. By providing FOGO bins for the students to use and educating all the students in the school community about FOGO they aim to greatly reduce the waste they send to landfill each week. If students correctly sort their FOGO waste the school will reduce what they send to landfill by more than 50%.

The Waste Busters completed their final waste audit on July 21st, 2021. The school are now sorting their waste into FOGO, recycling, landfill and Return & Earn. The bins are grouped together in a bin station at an easy access point for students to use. The Waste Busters have organised bin monitors to help educate all the students at the school about correct waste sorting. The students ran a colouring in competition to help advertise their new FOGO bins. The results from all their hard work are amazing.

The Waste Busters and their school community have –

• reduced the overall waste going to landfill by an enormous 71% (by weight) and 67% (by number of items)
• reduced the amount of FOGO in the landfill bin from 57% to 5% (by weight)
• 0% contamination in the new FOGO bin
• 0% contamination in the Return & Earn bins

Amazing achievement for the Waste Busters – well done!!

Inspiring kids to eat healthy, waste less and be change-makers in their local community

FEAST is a food waste education program from OzHarvest. The program runs for 7-10 weeks and is a STEM project-based learning program focusing on food and fibre and the cross-curriculum priority of Sustainability. Like any good FEAST, it’s designed to be fun, engaging and filled with good food! FEAST gets kids immersed in hands-on cooking activities in the classroom with our fully equipped kitchen kits. Our senior students began the program this week;