Tree Planting and the Restoration of Brook Stream

A couple of weeks ago our students were involved in tree planting along the Brook Stream. It had been identified that the condition of the stream had deteriorated over the years and there is very little life left in it. As you may have noticed was also is not very pleasant looking! 

                                  This has just changed!

With the help of Canopy Landscapes, The Nelson City Council, Nelmac, The Children of Nelson Central School and Rob and his colleagues at Future Ecology we are transforming the stream from Alton Street to just above the Manuka Street ford. 

Canopy is a local landscape architectural company that is keen to support the Enviro Schools Initiative. They are passionate about helping kids learn to care for their environment.  They have designed the fabulous landscape plan which has incorporated all the essential requirements for a stream to be a healthy ecosystem! 

We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone involved and we look forward to working with and caring for the stream in the future! 

Below are some before and during pictures. Please keep an eye out for the after pictures! 

Soup- A- Friday

On a cold winters day in May we held a Soup-A-Friday fundraiser to help raise money for up grading our waste management systems. 

Each child was asked to donate a vegetable and Lynley set about cutting these up and making some delicious Pumpkin and Vegetable soup. This was then sold back to the children at $1 a mug. It was great to see so many children bringing along their mug and purchasing some soup.   

We ended up selling out so it was a fantastic and healthy way to raise some money for our new bins. 

The Enviro group would like to thank everyone for their kind donation of vegetables for the soup, to our volunteers who heated and served the soup and also thank you to everyone who brought a cup of soup. 

We were able to raise $206!

Waste Audit

The newly appointed school Envirogroup took part in a waste audit on Friday the 23rd May. This involved us collecting the schools entire production of rubbish for the day. 

Following this we sorted it into categories. General waste, compostable paper,  food scraps, recyclable paper, glass, plastics and metal.  Once we sorted the rubbish we weighed it to see how much of each we had. This is what we found out.

In one day we produced:

35.5kgs Food Scraps

300 grams glass

3kg non recyclable plastic

800 grams card board

7.5 kgs of recyclable paper

1.2 kg compostable paper

200 grams metal/tins

2.6 kgs all other waste

As you can tell we have a few areas where we can really make some changes. Our envirogroup will be discussing ways we can change our waste management and hopefully reduce the amount of rubbish our school produces in return help reduce our carbon footprint, the damage we are causing to the environment and also save money on rubbish disposal! 

The children hope start composting, better paper recycling and want to educate our families on alternative ways to package school lunches therefore creating rubbish free lunch boxes! watch this space! 

Here are some photos from our waste audit: