Schools around South Africa are helping to make the country a cleaner, greener place to live and Bergvliet Primary School has received a huge pat on the back for it’s part in significantly boosting it’s collection rate of recyclable material.
Mpact Recycling, building on the success of its School Recycling Competition, recently honoured schools from Cape Town, Gauteng, Pretoria, Midrand, Durban and Richards Bay that have exhibited the greatest commitment to the initiative. These schools have increased their paper recycling figures significantly every year, and Bergvliet Primary is one of them. The school was one of the first to begin with the recycling programme and has shown a huge increase in the recyclable items they’ve collected over the years. In order to keep their carbon footprint as low as possible the school’s collection rate increased from 9.7 tonnes in 2015 and 14.7 tonnes in 2016, to more than 32 tonnes in 2017!
Healthy competition is experienced between classes and grades through inter-class competitions to see which one can collect the most glass or paper, and monitors take items from classrooms to the school’s depot for recycling.
Paper and packaging that can be recycled through the school recycling programme include bread tags and plastic bottle tops for wheelchairs; all types of glass bottles and glass jars including the jar lids without holes; all types of cans, aluminium and tin, and tin foil and aluminium trays; all paper including newspaper, advertising and magazines; common mix, which includes packaging such as boxes from cereals, toothpaste, teabags, the inner cardboard roll of toilet paper rolls, used gift wrapping, brown paper, paper bags, etc; corrugated cardboard boxes; plastic bottles with the following numbers on the base: 1, 2 and 5; soft plastic carrier bags and bread bags; tetrapaks for juice and long-life milk cartons, which must be washed out and flattened with the plastic tops removed; batteries and ink cartridges.
Mpact Recycling communications manager, Donna-Mari Noble, says the competition, which runs from February to September every year, encourages nursery schools, primary schools and high schools to collect as much recyclable paper and packaging as possible.
“The schools are paid per ton collected, which they can then use to fund various school initiatives such as creating vegetable gardens, painting classrooms or buying books. These schools not only outperformed other schools in their districts, but increased their tonnage consistently over the years,” says Noble.
“We would like to see more schools join the programme. “To those who are already part of the programme, please continue to grow your tonnages and help make South Africa a cleaner and healthier place to live.”
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Tokai, Kirstenhof, Bergvliet, Meadowridge: Schools
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Giving the gift of water to Cape Town
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