Lack of trust sparks recycling woes

Litter: we’ve all seen it. Polluting our oceans and eradicating entire species. Every day we grow immune to the sight of litter. Places such as the Pacific Garbage Patch and the outskirts and slums of Mumbai piled high with others rubbish. As the saying goes ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ however that’s not the case- soon we will be the victims of a litter apocalypse. If we don’t alter our attitude towards litter and link it to responsibility it may be too late, and we are unable to reverse years of damage and pollution.

​Teachers and students are highly aware of the impacts of littering but as a community we are unable to take responsibility and aid change. A trusted source from our school has disclosed to Fulston Manor News that a company called AMC, whose aim is to reduce your waste, maximising recycling and saving money could have provided suitable and more ecological solutions than landfill for Fulston Manor’s rubbish.  The plan was to move to an environmentally focused refuse disposal.  Some ideas would be to move to communal bins (no bins in classrooms) and to introduce reverse vending where costs can be made to work. However, my source has revealed that Fulston Manor’s leadership group almost instantaneously refused the offer on the grounds that ‘students wouldn't buy into recycling and that it wouldn’t be worth investing in’.  The offer that AMC approached the school with was that waste disposal would gradually decrease over time and AMC would come in and run an assembly for students, provide signage and an educational animation for us to act as prompts on screens around the school. On top of this ACM would also supply the school with a reverse vending for free but still the school held firm with their decision that the students would be unwilling to cooperate with the reverse vending machine. 

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In the words of the Cree Indians ‘when the last tree is cut down, when the last fish is eaten and the last stream is poisoned, perhaps then you will realise that you cannot eat money’ ~ Mr Matthews

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Mr Matthews from the English Department is extremely passionate about recycling and saving the environment. ​

In an interview, Mr Matthews told us that ‘We live in an age where the western world is waking up to the enormous impact the lifestyles of its population are having on the planet. One part of this is plastic usage’.  Every year 500 billion single use items are disposed of and only 1% of it is recycled*. 

One bag of plastic bottles collected from one classroom in the N block over the duration of a week. How many plastic bottles currently blight our learning environment? Image by Darcy Lunniss

​Those items could range from a bottle cap to a microwave meal carton. Mr Matthews believes that ‘it would be foolish to think that a few thousand bottles collected a term will change the world, but as a school community we have a responsibility to ensure suitable thinking and behaviour amongst our young people.’   He adds ‘most importantly of all is the realisation that we cannot quantify our existence and the world we live in through money alone. In the words of Cree Indians ‘when the last tree is cut down, when the last fish is eaten and the last stream is poisoned, perhaps then you will realise that you cannot eat money.’ 

Report by Amelia Goodwin 
 *Sources: Ocean Crusaders