Sustainability

Donvale Primary School has made a commitment to become a more sustainable school. We identified the need to educate children about being  conscious of waste and assist them to identify sustainable practices for school and home.

Sustainability units have been developed across the school, with a different focus at every level. The students have been learning about the 4R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle, rethink). They discussed ways to reduce and reuse a range of items at school and home, then proceeded to put them into practice. They spent much time learning about the recycling process for a range of products including paper, glass, metal and plastic. Donvale students have also become skilled at being water and energy wise.

In an effort to reduce our waste every class has been given a worm food bucket with a worm food menu (a list of the food that worms like to eat). All food/fruit scraps go into the bucket and monitors have been assigned to collect the food, crush it and feed it to the worms. We then use the worm castings on our vegetable garden.

Nude Food days are held weekly, when every child in the school attempts to bring a rubbish free lunch and the rubbish is totalled in every classroom. Each week the class with the least amount of rubbish receives the prize of chocolate (Violet Crumbles that are not individually wrapped) and the class that wins the overall prize receive a hot chip lunch (we can recycle the paper).

Whilst our focus has been to reduce and reuse we understand that this is not always possible. We also try to recycle much of our waste. Items that are recycled at our school include:

·         Cardboard

·         Paper

·         Bottles and Containers

·         printer cartridges

·         Worm farms

·         tennis balls

·         Saving water from the drinking taps for our garden.

Vegetable garden

We have four garden beds that were constructed by our parents at a working bee. A 10 000 litre rainwater tank is also attached to the garden. This was purchased by the School Council and installed by qualified parents.

Working in the Vegetable Garden - March 2009

 Wednesday 4th March Mrs Tourogiannis's grade and some of 3H helped in the vegie patch. I got to pull out the weeds and put out the pea straw. It smelt like weetbix. It started to rain. Mrs Tourogiannis told us to get under shade and said to go back to class but we didn’t because it stopped and we got back to work. It was fun.