Enviroweek Magic

 

We were very busy during Enviroweek. Each grade put in measures to reduce paper to see if we can beat the Tree Hugger Challenge of saving more than 2 reams for the year. We thought that that challenge was very achievable but little did we know how amazing our results would be. Each morning paper counts were taken on our two photocopiers and then we graphed our results. On average we normally use 750 pages per day which is shown as a red line on the graph. For enviroweek you can see that each day we have dramatically reduced our paper usage except for Thursday.

At assembly the students were asked to discuss why we might use more on a Thursday and they made the connection with Thursday being the school newsletter day. Students suggested that we could email the newsletter to parents instead. The school has previously informed the school community of the availability of the newsletter electronically and a few families have taken up this option.  We will continue to encourage more families to sign up for an electronic newsletter.

 

At the end of each day the rubbish and the paper was collected from each room. Almost every classroom had put in place a way of separating the paper waste from the normal rubbish. By the end of the week we collected one 240L bin full of paper that would normally go to land fill.

 

You would have to agree that our efforts sound amazing. But it doesn't stop there. During assembly our savings were demonstrated by members of the Green Team. Two very strong girls stood out the front holding the reams of paper that we used for the week and the reams of paper that we saved for the week. Those reams weigh a lot and holding a week's worth of paper requires real strength. We used 3.96 reams and saved 3.54 reams.

If you looked at that in terms of what we could save in a year it is very impressive. Even at half of the figure of 141.5 (around 79 reams) that is amazing but if we were to save 3.538 reams a week during a 40 week school year we would save 141.2 reams of paper.

 WOW

Of course this is based on the exceptional paper use data from Enviroweek but still it is an indicator of what is possible if everyone comes on board. This information will be presented to school council on the 4th of September. Hopefully the school council will see the significant savings and benefit in  encouraging our school reduce it's paper usage and recommend a goal for us to work towards. Even a 25% reduction of our paper usage will be achievable and a significant savings.

Additionally the collection of paper for reuse and recycling will reduce what we send to land fill by 40 bins per year. That is 9.6 cubic meters of landfill that we can recycle. Based on these figures and future predictions the school will investigate more cost effective and efficient ways of collecting and recycling paper. This will begin with making sure each classroom has facilities to collect scrap/waste paper for recycling.

Here are some pictures of the Green Team checking how much paper we collected for the week.