Australia's schoolchildren took a 'carrot-and-stick' approach to encouraging local manufacturers to make use of recycled packaging in their operations in their entries to Australian Recycled Cartonboard's (ARC's) 2012 National Schools Competition.
Eco-conscious students from years three and four in schools across Australia challenged local businesses to “buy recycled first” and recognise that “recycling only works, if you buy recycled too” in their entries to this year's contest, which offered $10,000 to the winning school.
The top prize went to Queensland's Windaroo Primary, where students produced brochures, distributed throughout their community, identifying the manufacturers who buy recycled, and those who don’t.
They then packaged them into a display for the 95,000 visitors to the Queensland Museum for four weeks around this year's National Science Week, before presenting their whole communications package on You Tube.
The ARC Campaign was started in 1995 to help reduce the country's waste stream and create Australian jobs by encouraging more manufacturers to use recycled packaging, rather than virgin cartonboard.
This year's competition was judged on three criteria: How they communicated the message that "recycling only works, if you buy recycled too"; their creativity in communicating the message; and the extent to which the students engaged their community in their campaigns.
“The achievement of the students is exceptional. The creativity and scale of their entries to effectively communicate the key messages was beyond that of many professionals,” the national coordinator of the Australian Recycled Cartonboard National Schools Competition, Phil Enright, said.
“The commitment of schools like our winners of this year’s Competition, Windaroo Primary School and their dedicated teacher, Rebecca Johnson, is essential to sustain community pressure to keep industry expanding its use of recycled waste in the packaging they use.”
Victoria's Wallington Primary took second prize for their efforts to persuade all stakeholders to use recycled materials by producing an engaging animated musical film clip, while Bentleigh West Primary School, also in Victoria, earned third place by challenging their council and larger employers via interviews with CEO’s and officers to establish what they were doing to ensure they ‘buy recycled too’.
“It shows any school can win, and regional primary schools and their communities usually produce the most outstanding outcomes,” Enright said.
“These students had to compete against all the highly resourced private and metropolitan secondary schools across Australia. They again demonstrated that there is no substitute for the kind of community commitment we see every day in regional Australia.”
“All three winning schools produced a range of extraordinary communications and engagements with all spheres of influence in their communities – business, government, community/not for profit organisations and the media. And they did not let up!”
“Most importantly, all winners’ entries relentlessly reinforced the behaviour changes we all must make to achieve a sustainable future – particularly our manufacturers who import foreign packaging, and in so doing, export Australian jobs.”
Enright said that since the ARC had kicked off its campaigns in the 1990s, Australian industry had made great strides in using recycled materials, with 44 per cent of local busineses now using recycled steel, 64 per cent using aluminium, 21 per cent recycled plastic and 35 per cent using recycled glass packaging.
“Switching to Australian recycled packaging not only promotes recycling and saves Australian jobs, it also takes away the market for ‘wood chip’ fibre taken from high conservation value forests, the habitat of many endangered species,” he said.
Winning schools were presented with their rewards during this year's National Recycling Week.
Years 3 and 4 students from Victoria's Bentleigh West Primary are presented with their prize for winning the 2012 Australian Recycled Cartonboard National Schools Challenge.
