Sesame Lane Kippa-Ring School Zone celebrates sustainability win

Sesame Lane Kippa-Ring School Zone recently completed the Early Learning Centre Waste Minimisation Program offered through the Moreton Bay Regional Council. 

The program runs over 18 months with the goal of teaching Educators to support children to be empowered to affect environmental change and to achieve on-ground practice and behaviour change to avoid and minimise general waste to landfill and increase recycling and recovery.

Educators in turn teach children “because the children are the ones who are going to make a difference for our future.”

Guidance, advice, training, infrastructure and resources are provided to engage centres and the children in their care in meaningful investigations of on-site waste issues, thereby informing the design and implementation of more sustainable and appropriate waste management systems. 

Sesame Lane Kippa-Ring School Zone has noticed many benefits from participating in the program, including:

• Access to continual guidance, support and resources 

• Understanding of the service’s waste issues clearly and simply 

• Improvement in the efficiency of the service’s waste management services and systems

• Understanding local waste facility processes and accepted items in waste collection services 

• Reduction in general waste volumes to landfill and associated costs 

• Improvement of recycling and other valuable resource diversion and recovery processes 

• Empowerment of child/family ownership of the issue and engagement in the solution 

• Processes to support and collaborate with all stakeholder levels and rationales 

• Creation of waste management systems that reflect ‘best practice’ in the community 

• Creation and consultation with a waste minimisation action plan for our Service that will provide resilience, and endeavour to embed and sustain implemented practice and behaviour change 

• Becoming leaders in sustainability and champions of waste minimisation for the Moreton Bay region.

Council audits all waste output by the Service at the beginning of the program to have a starting point. At the conclusion of the program the Service must present to council what they implemented and embedded during the program to support sustainable practices and reduce landfill waste. 

Following this presentation another audit was undertaken by the Council to gauge the progress made by the service. 

“The Council,” a Sesame Lane spokesperson said, “was so impressed by the results, new practices embraced and embedded, and the presentation made that Sesame Lane Kippa Ring – School Zone had their Waste Minimisation Program published into a book by the Moreton Bay Regional Council.”

Service Manager Kelly Chan was invited to a morning tea at local council chambers where School Zones hard work and dedication was acknowledged by the Council.  

To learn more about Sesame Lane Kippa-Ring School Zone please see here. For information about the Moreton Bay Program, please see here.