During Environment Week, Sancta Maria College had the privilege to have Claudia Cairns, our guest speaker from Plastic Diet to come in and speak to us at our school assembly.
As a school, we are all somewhat aware of whether plastic is good or not. And now we’ve finally had the chance to be taught more about how plastic can be hazardous to the environment. Collectively, we acquired a few useful tips on how to live more plastic-conscious lives.
A good point that we should all pick up, is the top four plastics we should all avoid – coffee cups, plastic bags, plastic bottles and plastic straws. Through this presentation, we learnt that there are
many alternatives to ‘the big four’ which will effectively support the environment, if we were to refuse them.
Replacing plastic bags with reusable eco-friendly bags; plastic bottles (such as Pump) with reusable bottles and even carrying around a metal straw to refuse the plastic straws that we are accustomed to use and then dispose of, there and then. Sancta Maria College is currently targeting coffee cups and we have taken a very successful, huge step towards doing our part. The enviro team managed to sell all the reusable cups within two days and all who took part got free drinks for the entire week.
Other tips we learnt were to buy in bulk, use biodegradable bamboo products (toothbrush, cotton buds), line bins with newspaper, reuse containers and avoid microbeads (support Ecostore and Lush).
A clean, beautiful earth with an abundance of biodiversity is one we all want to live in and pass on to our future generations. At the end of the day, this all comes down to us simply making eco-conscious, plastic-conscious decisions everyday.
Katrina Chan
