Welcome back everyone! We hope our community is looking forward to an active and fun year for all things to do with sustainability. Our Student Leader Group will have its first meeting next week, when our existing leaders will start to plan Term 1. One thing on the agenda is to vote in our new year level leaders. We encourage every student with a passion for the environment and living sustainably to apply.

The Vegetable Garden

Despite a few weeks of neglect over the holidays, the vegetable garden is doing well, especially with the help of the irrigation system that was installed last year. The herbs are growing in abundance and we have strawberries and tomatoes ripening. The Kilbreda Garden Club will need to do some weeding when we meet this week (Friday) as the weeds have also grown well over the holidays!

Resource Smart Schools

We are still working to complete our Core Module for Resource Smart Schools. It feels like we have been working on this for ages, but we are almost there. The next step is to submit our completed module for assessment by Sustainability Victoria. In the meantime, we have started work on our next module – the ‘Waste’ module. The Sustainability Leaders will conduct a waste audit on ‘Schools Clean Up Day’ on 3 March to review where we are doing well and where we can improve.

Bin Labels

Over the Summer holidays, new stickers were applied to the new outside bins clearly identifying what goes into which waste bin. These stickers were designed by a group of 2022, Year 9 Environmental Science and Sustainability students and they look fantastic! The students used pictures of items that are commonly thrown away at the College and contacted Kingston Council to make sure that we were correctly identifying which bin to use. For example, Did you know that bamboo cutlery goes in the landfill bin, not the green or yellow bins?

Year 8 Foreshore Program

Plans are underway for this year’s Foreshore Program. This program is in partnership with Kingston Council and the College. A group of students are selected to participate in activities to conserve and care for the Mentone Foreshore. The rangers are excited to meet our next group of students! Applications will be called for over the next two weeks.

Sarah Avitabile
Sustainability Leader