Living Heritage -
Mapua School
Mapua - The good, the bad, and the ugly
What a load of RUBBISH!!
REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE
The rubbish on our Earth is increasing every day.
At Mapua School the topic was, "Mapua - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly". Room 5 decided to find out:
- how much rubbish we throw away
- what it’s doing to our environment, and
- how we can stop it.
What percentage of what we chuck away can we recycle at Mapua School?
Room 5 took the challenge of finding out what us kids really chuck away at Mapua School. After emptying the bins and sorting the rubbish into piles we found that about 40% of what we throw away is plastics, 30% is food, 28% is paper and 2% is other stuff.
Heaps of the things you see in these photos could be recycled. Instead, all that rubbish is being lugged off to landfills every day! All the rubbish that goes into landfills takes years to decompose not to mention most of it pollutes the environment.
Instead of dumping all that food into landfills you could create a compost heap at your school or even a worm farm. Gosh all that plastic wrap makes me sick!
Instead of chucking the plastic that wraps your sandwiches why not reuse them?
And all those plastic yoghurt containers - yuck! Instead of buying tiny yoghurt pots, buy big containers of yoghurt and small reusable containers for your lunches.
As for all that paper, you could use both sides of it before you chuck it away. Not only will this help save our environment, it will also help save the trees.
If we do this, we’d reduce our school waste by approximately 50%.
NEWSFLASH UPDATE!!!
Soon after the waste audit at Mapua School, all the playground bins were removed and now students have to take all their rubbish home. Is this just moving the problem to another place???
Paper recycling bins have been put in every classroom, and children are being educated to reduce the amount of paper they use, make sure they re-use scrap paper, and then put it in the recycling bin!
PLASTIC BAGS
Another subject that came up when we were looking at R.R.R. was the overuse of plastic bags. We were visited by the GREEN TEENS who had recently been to Sweden as part of their PLASTIC - NOT FANTASTIC project. They told us many facts about plastic bags, as well as encouraging us to make a difference by not using them ourselves.
How can we reduce the use of plastic bags in Mapua?
By educating people about the negatives of using plastic bags and making more use of eco-bags and re-useable cardboard boxes.
Why should we reduce plastic bag usage?
Only 1 to 3% of plastic bags get recycled.
Plastic bags have been the cause of blocked drains.
18 million tonnes of plastic bags are thrown away. These are worth more than $3 billion.
One plastic bag takes1 million years to decompose.
Plastic bags release toxic gases when burnt.
They are unnecessary.
