WEST Greenwood Primary School has spent the year reducing the waste generated at lunch time and from the canteen.
The canteen has been using reusable containers for recess snacks and drinks instead of single-use plastic containers, and the school’s P&C and Waste Wise Committee has been looking to reintroduce Waste Free Wednesdays within the school.
Then in a bid to provide parents with tools to reduce wastes in lunch boxes, the school obtained a grant from the City of Joondalup to make reusable sandwich wraps for every child in the school.
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READ NOW“The lunch wrap material was purchased with the grant funds and then over 20 parents, teachers, grandparents, teachers’ parents and even ladies with no connection to the school but just supporting the sustainable initiative were involved with cutting and sewing the wraps,” waste wise subcommittee member Simone Staaden said.
“We made 463 reusable lunch wraps for every child in the school and they have been enthusiastically adopted into children’s lunchboxes.
“The grant also allowed for purchasing of additional reusable containers for the canteen including smoothie cups, lunch boxes and food containers.”
Some of the school’s Year 4 students also took part in a waste wise audit, which Ms Staaden said provided “very valuable feedback in regards to the volumes of each waste stream being generated by the school”.
This audit estimated more than 53,000 soft plastic snack packets were being used at the school each year.
“This class then created fabulous reduce, reuse, recycle posters for the school to continue raising awareness of our ecological footprint,” she said.
“The school has also expanded the composting of fruit and vegetable scraps and has adopted a soft plastic challenge to reduce the number of crinkly snack packet wrappers in children’s lunch boxes.”