The ELC are becoming Waste Warriors!
This term, the ELC will have a focus around recycling. We are joining with the school at large to look at our waste and how we can reduce, reuse and recycle. This has been spearheaded by Tintern’s student-led Green Team.
We have started by looking at our food waste and establishing compost bins within the classrooms. The children then take the collected compost and add to our tumbling compost bins in the garden. We will be asking the children what to do with the product that this will create and where we can reuse it. This provides opportunities for rich learning around life-cycles and our impact on the earth.
From here we will start to sort our plastics into hard and soft as these types of plastics need to be recycled differently. We are joining the school in collecting our soft plastics. School-wide these will be recycled into something new.
Next week, we will be establishing paper collection points in each room and discussing our use of paper as a centre and with the children.
We have provided bins for tissue collection as these types of paper product cannot be recycled. A lot of tissue paper is made from already recycled paper. This means that it can’t be recycled again, the fibres are too short and will result in poor pulp in the recycling process. But we can add them to our compost bins.
And this is just the beginning as throughout the term we will introduce other initiatives into the Early Learning Centre.
Our hope is to embed into the program the understanding of reduce, reuse and recycle, thereby reducing our waste footprint.
by Kristin De Vos, Director of ELC