Planet Ark and various other organisations are pulling out all the stops this year for National Recycling Week. You can register your school and involve your students in all the fun.
There is a curriculum toolkit to help you integrate recycling into your lessons and a Recycle Rescue Game to keep everyone entertained among many other things. Get involved!
It is on again! Follow this link to see this flyer online, watch the video and register.
https://www.smore.com/see0r-2015-youth-eco-summit-yes?ref=email
Ever wondered what happens after you flush? If you live in an urban area then your waste will disappear down the pipes and you will probably not give it any further thought. Most likely your waste will travel to a Sewage Treatment Plant (STP), then eventually it will end up back in our waterways. For most of the 15 or so STP’s in Western Sydney, the water will return from whence it came – back in the Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment as tertiary treated sewage.
We recently had a fantastic day with Cherrybrook Technology High School and their Year 11 Geography Class at the Rouse Hill Recycled STP. These lucky students have a fantastic teacher who has organised a series of excursions looking at Biophysical Interactions pertaining to water. They came to us for a River Ecology day and tested the health of the Hawkesbury river a few months ago, then we went further upstream to look at the source of all the nutrients we found in the river – the STP at Rouse Hill. Rouse Hill is quite unique in that it recycles a large percentage of water back into the township via the purple pipes to water gardens and flush toilets.
This is a MUST DO excursion for all students and it certainly improved my knowledge and water waste awareness. Download the Sydney Water Excursion Program flyer or contact us to arrange one for you. Students began by interacting with a working catchment model to see how farming and urban water practices can alter runoff into our waterways.
They then discovered what can and can’t go down the toilet! Toilet paper and excrement is fine – just about everything else is not. The flushable toilet wipes turned out to be not so flushable after all.
Someone at the STP has the gruesome job of de-clogging the filters of this waste – so think of them when next you flush! No plastics, tissues or other stuff down the toilet!
There are alternatives to mass waste treatment of course….
If you live without connected sewage like here at Brewongle and at my home, then waste disposal is a big issue.
We have a fantastic worm farm waste system at my house and a similar system operates here at work. ALL waste (yes including the brown stuff!) goes into a large worm farm composting system. The worms have a great time devouring this as well as our food compost. The product is nutrient rich water that has been cleaned by worms. We then pump this under our gardens for healthy plants! Are more of these the answer to our waste problems in urban areas?
When you visit the supermarket – do you think about where your food has travelled from to end up on your plate? Do you know how it is grown? How much energy and resources are required to grow and move it to you? Are your oranges from California? Apples from New Zealand or China? Do you seek out local produce to reduce your ‘food miles’?
The amount of energy and resources used to produce your food (and everything else you consume) and the amount of waste produced can be measured and used to create your ‘ecological footprint’. We can measure this for communities, cities and countries. In short, your ecological footprint is measured in ‘global hectares per person’ and is a guide to how much of the earth’s limited resources your region is using up. The earths resources are called the available biocapacity.
Some of you may not be surprised to discover that by the mid 1980’s our global eco footprint began to exceed the earths biocapacity. This means we are building an ecological debt. The following facts and figures have been lifted from the Ecological Footprint Report from Penrith City Council.
The earths biocapacity is calculated at 1.73 global hectares per person. As Australians we have an average of nearly 6 global hectares per person. If you live in Penrith you use 5.36 global hectares per person. This means that if everyone lived like the people of Penrith we would need 3.10 PLANETS to sustain us.
Feel good about yourselves though Penrithians! On the whole you are better than the rest of the country which devours nearly 3.5 planets worth of resources. Are we totally crazy to be living like this?
Food consumption makes up the biggest proportion of most of our eco footprints and Brewongle has teamed up with Penrith City Council and a local business called Harvest Hampers to create an education resource for school students to help them wise up to consumption and waste issues. As part of this resource we have developed a video on local inititatives and farmers who are trying to keep our community connected to their food.
Here is an initiative that you might be able to help and be involved in right now. The Open Food Network.
The email below just came out from Mike Bartlett at the Sydney Olympic Park Authority. Very good news that YES is on again. Brewongle will be there! Bring your class to join us…..
Dear friends and colleagues,
YES! its that time of year again. Please share this with your school and agency networks. The invitation is now open for program providers to showcase at YES 2014 and for Schools to participate in this amazing event.
Late 2013, YES received an award from United Nations as one of 6 Global Flagship Projects fostering Youth Engagement and Capacity Building. This year we are once again going global by connecting up Australian students and their sustainability projects with schools doing similar things overseas. Our action theme this year is ‘Family Food and Farming’ and our friends at the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW will be playing a special part in the event. Don’t miss out. BOOK NOW.
https://www.smore.com/jhws3-2014-youth-eco-summit?ref=email-content#w-8438607317
http://www.sydneyolympicpark.com.au/education_and_learning/partnerships/YES
What did you do for World Environment Day? If your school had an event or participated in something I would love to hear about it and put it up on this blog!
Brewongle was involved in a fantastic event with about 70 primary school students from public schools around the Hawkesbury area. We all descended on the Earthcare Centre at the University of Western Sydney Richmond Campus for an inspiring day of sustainability. Well done Vicky Whitehead from Longneck Lagoon EEC for organising such a superb event.
Students moved through various workshops during the day. These were provided by Longneck Lagoon EEC, Brewongle EEC, UWS, Windsor High, The Hawkesbury Environment Network, Hawkesbury City Council and the Earthcare Centre.
After building worm farms, learning about compost, planting broccoli, testing soils, riding energy bikes, making low energy smoothies, discovering other great school sustainability projects, looking at low waste lunches and many others, students did a waste audit on all rubbish from the day and then began planning sustainability strategies to implement back in their own schools.
Judging by the plans produced, worm farming was a hit and many students plan to make vege beds and compost heaps as well.
We are looking forward to a video conference later in the year and hearing of each schools progress as they implement their plans.
Stand up paddleboarding (SUP) seems to be the new thing to do on the water these days. At Brewongle we are used to more traditional sit down kayaking and canoeing, but last week we had a visitor on a major SUP adventure. Stuart Murray is currently circumnavigating the Sydney Basin on a paddleboard and he stayed with us at Brewongle on his journey up the Hawkesbury River last week. After starting his epic adventure from Narrabeen Lakes, he paddled up the coast and moseyed into the Hawkesbury River. Stuart is raising awareness for the Tangaroa Blue Foundation. They are a charity that is all about protecting our oceans and cleaning up marine debris.
Stuart calls his business SupExplore and he is currently towards the end of his journey around Sydney. You can follow him on Facebook to see where he is. He paddled hundreds of kilometres up the Hawkesbury Nepean river to Penrith – and enjoyed the hospitality of many locals along the way, including Brewongle EEC and some Members of the Windsor Canoe Club.
I joined him (in a comfy kayak!) for the challenging upstream section from Castlereagh to Penrith and was amazed at his control and skill to navigate moving water in the wrong direction! After we paddled to Penrith, he gamely strapped himself to his board on wheels and headed off on foot for a long portage to the Georges River.
We wish him well on the final stages as he heads home and navigates the open ocean up the coast.
From the Sustainable Schools NSW latest newsletter
Don’t let your students miss this opportunity to join thousands of Australian students clean up their school grounds or local parks. This year it will be on Friday 28 February. By registering with Schools Clean Up Day now, you can receive a Clean Up Starter Kit with event organisation advice and information as well as learning materials. Register now.
Students can also enter the Clean Up Australia’s Green Kids Award.
Visit our waste focus area for more student learning materials including links to waste audits and school waste product road maps.
“Think about it, why would you make something that you’re going to use for a few minutes out of a material that’s basically going to last forever, and you’re just going to throw it away. What’s up with that?” – Jeb Berrier (Bag It movie).
The world uses 10 billion disposable plastic bags every week (let me just emphasise this!!!! it looks worse with all the zeros – thats 10,000 000 000!!) and we Australians are the second highest producers of waste on the planet (the USA gets the gold medal for the highest producers of waste). Most of this waste is plastic that can take up to 1000 years to break down. (source – http://www.cleanup.org.au/au/Campaigns/plastic-bag-facts.html) Plastic Free July is a way for your school, business or family to reduce your consumption of single use plastic.
At Brewongle we are constantly trying to reduce our environmental footprint and we have signed up for Plastic Free July – we will be trying to meet our goals and encourage all visiting schools to participate also! Join in and reduce your plastic waste. Visit the website for more information at http://www.plasticfreejuly.org/index.html
We are knee deep in another fantastic program at the moment called Climate Clever Energy Savers. We are the regional coordinators of this program that sees Western Sydney school students proposing plans to reduce energy use in their schools. Our solar cars and sun ovens have been the hit so far as we visit schools to help them on their sustainable journey. We have been impressed and inspired by the knowledge and motivation of these students to make a real difference to our energy use and carbon emissions.
Climate Clever particpants – don’t forget the wiki! http://cces13.wikispaces.com/
Brewongle Environmental Education Centre 