Reducing Plastic in Awahono School

After reading a School Journal article about how Collingwood was the first place in New Zealand to ban plastic bags (all the way back in 2005), we wondered how we could make a difference in our school. We noticed that our classroom bins all had plastic bin liners that were thrown away with the rubbish each day, so we all wrote to our principal about this to try and persuade her to do something about it. Here is one of our letters:

Dear Mrs Wallace,

All over the school we use plastic bags for bin liners. In my opinion we should not use them for bin liners. I have three good reasons why we should not use plastic bags for bin liners.

Firstly, I strongly believe we should not use plastic bags for bin liners because we usually only put dry paper and food packaging in most of the classroom bins. It is not wet materials or slimy contents going into the bin, so there is no reason for using plastic bags for bin liners.

Secondly, I think we should not use plastic bags for bin liners because it would save money. We could use the money for other things like school books or stationery. Guess what? We use two thousand plastic bags a year just at our school. THAT’S CRAZY! Think of the savings we could make. We could save at least one hundred dollars a year on plastic bags.

Thirdly, we should not use plastic bags for bin liners. Two thousand get thrown away every year. That's fifty a week and ten a day just at our school. It all goes into landfill ruining the environment. If we don’t stop plastic from polluting our earth,  the world might just be a big pile of plastic floating in space. You know that plastic is a problem and we can do something about it here at school.

In conclusion, I think we should not use plastic bags as bin liners at school because we don't need them, it would save money, and it's good for the environment. I hope that you will make some changes at this school to help the environment.

.

Yours sincerely,

Amelia

Mrs Wallace read all our letters and then wrote
back to us, saying that she agreed with what we
had said and that as from Term 4 there would be
no more bin liners for dry rubbish in our
classrooms! Great result, Room 5.

We realise that this is a small change, but if we all make a small change to try to reduce the amount of plastic we use, all the small changes will add up to make a bigger change.