Thank you for helping the student council reduce the amount of rubbish in our school and help us ensure Avonhead School is a more sustainable school.

It has come to the student council’s attention that rubbish in our school has increased this year and we want to make our school a “clean green place! This means it is our goal to decrease the amount of plastic in lunch boxes and reduce the amount of rubbish blowing around our school.

To begin with the student council is setting all students and teams a challenge and goal to see how many students can have litter free lunches at school this term. Let the team challenge begin and see what team will lead the way this term. 

Our student councillors will be helping out on duty this term also (they will be wearing their named council badges) and be handing out Litter free AA cards to help promote this. These cards will go into the house boxes and the draw for lunch with the principal as well as this there will be a class reward at the end of the term. Our student council also want to support and encourage students to look after our environment more, by encouraging more students to pick up rubbish they see lying around our school too - so our councillors will be on the hunt for some Avonhead Enviro Superstars by handing them special AA awards this term also. 

We know that 100% litter free lunches may not be possible, however we want to encourage all our students to use the soft plastic bins that we are planning on putting around the school soon, so that we can do more to make our school and community more sustainable. More about this coming soon. 

As a student council, through our investigating, we found out there are innovative companies in New Zealand reusing and recycling soft plastics too, to make amazing sustainable materials. Soft plastics can't get recycled through our normal recycling bins however, but instead of going into landfill soft plastics can get collected (at certain stations around NZ), and turned into products such as beverage cartons, saveBoard (saveboard.nz), fence posts. Did you know there is also a soft plastic collection point at New World Ilam? Very soon we hope to set up soft plastic collection bins in our school so that we can do our bit to not only reduce rubbish and recycle the usual materials but recycle soft plastics too. If you want more information about recycling go to recycling.kiw.nz. We need everyone to help to help reduce the amount of waste going into landfill and help us help our planet too and our student council are on a mission to make this happen.

Thank you for supporting the student council and helping Avonhead School begin its journey to being a better contributor by being a more sustainable school. 

Bella Cutforth

Communications Student Council