We hope your week has been as productive and joyful as ours has been here at WBGS. With plenty of new and exciting ideas in the pipeline, there are a few fun things we wanted to share with you, both in our local community and nationwide.
You may have seen local community members carrying bags full of plastic and wondered what their intended use could be. Implemented in November last year, the Queensland Containers for Change Scheme refunds 10c for every eligible bottle or can collected, and this small incentive successfully saw 100 million bottles and cans collected within the first two months of its implementation! What you see in our communities is the beginning of more plastic being taken off the streets and out of landfill. We are so excited about this great initiative to take back needless waste and cycle money back into the community — this amazing effort will help us all reduce the number of plastic containers going to landfill each year. We now need to raise efforts toensure these containers become the food for future production.
We love active things with great messages and feel that establishing human connections while working hard towards environmental sustainability is really important. Last Friday we went #plogging along the Brisbane river and through the Botanic Gardens, finding many items along the water’s edge — plastic bags, bottles, polystyrene and even a red shoe (totally on brand, but ready for the bin unfortunately!). You’ll often find a lot of waste in or near water and I think it’s important to remember that anything we produce as a society needs to have an appropriate place at it’s end of life.
And that’s the perfect lead-in to Australia’s largest and most successful community-based environmental event which is coming up next week. Australians all over the country will be gathering in their local communities to #cleanupaustralia, and we couldn’t be more pleased. Schools, businesses, youth groups, community groups and councils alike will spend their sunny Sunday picking up rubbish that’s accumulated in public areas across the nation. Did you know in 2018, the estimated rubbish removed came to 16,942.2 ute loads?! Though our primary goal is always to prevent rubbish entering our environment, it’s also just as important to take a look around and remove the rubbish that is already there.
If you’d like to create or join a Clean Up, please head over to the Clean Up Australia Day website to find out how. Depending on who you choose to clean up your community with, there are a couple of main dates where you’ll be able to chip in with workmates, friends and family!
Business Clean Up Day — Tuesday 26 February 2019
Youth and Schools Clean Up Day — Friday 1 March 2019
Clean Up Australia Day — Sunday 3 March 2019
