Environmental Captain Report

We’ve had an exciting and busy year for our Environmental Team. Here are some of the highlights.

We started off with ‘Clean up Australia Day’ in Term 1 to make the space where we learn and play cleaner and promote better practice in waste disposal. This was held over 3 days where we had a team of volunteers from Years 7 and 8 clean the junior and senior areas as well as the oval and the tennis courts. During the week we collected 3 full garbage bags of litter as well as identifying catchment areas that need more attention and areas where more garbage bins had to be installed.

We also introduced the Keep Cup Wash Station which last year's Environmental Captain Paddy helped create. This was designed as a space for the cups used at the coffee van to be washed and reused to help reduce the amount of litter coming from the van.

Following this we held the movie “2040” on World Environmental Day in the MacKillop Senior Centre Theatre. It was a documentary exploring the future concerns to the environment as well as empowering young people to become change-makers.

To finish off Term 3 we celebrated Feast Day with our annual tree planting. We were kindly donated a range of shrubs from Barwon Water which were planted near the senior quad and Loyola Building by students and teachers across the school.

This year we have paired with Citizen Science to have different themes for each Term. In Term 1 the theme was “Take three for the Sea” which encouraged people to pick up three pieces of rubbish each time they went to the beach. In Term 2 the theme was the Frog Count to learn about the threats to the frogs' habitats. Last Term’s theme was the Aussie Bird Count where we learned about the impacts of habitat loss, pollution and climate change and this term's theme will be the Climate Watch to learn about how change in temperature and rainfall can affect the seasonal behaviour of Australia’s plants and animals.

Overall, we have had a very successful year for the SICG Environmental group and have some very exciting events lined up for next year which all students and teachers can get involved in! We would also like to thank Mr Brown for helping make this all happen.

Kind regards,

Isabella Milne | Environment Captain