Students at a women's college in Melbourne, Australia, have declared war on waste and decided to remove all bins from the campus.
The sustainability student committee at Melbourne Girls' College (MGC) spent six months in dialogue with fellow students, parents and teachers to devise a plan to reduce the amount of waste produced by the school. The ultimate goal is to become the first Australian secondary school to achieve zero waste production by 2020.
To make their campus more sustainable, the students decided to remove all bins; from now on, 1,400 students and 140 staff will bring their lunch in recyclable, plastic-free containers and take any leftovers home. Just as is done in Australian nature parks, where visitors are responsible for disposing of their own waste.
Only three bins remain available: one for organic waste, one inside the bathrooms and one for emergencies.
"Removing the bins forces students to think outside the box to come up with innovative solutions that can serve as an example to others," said Karen Money, the college's principal.
The school has introduced an incentive scheme to encourage students to give up all types of waste. Those who wish to can submit to a kind of check, and if they manage to bring a meal that is genuinely plastic-free, they will be entitled to discounts on campus. Even the canteen, run by an external company, has decided to embrace the student initiative and reduce its environmental footprint by replacing plastic products, where possible, with alternatives made from recycled paper.
"Rather than passing the blame, we want to create a proactive approach to the problem: disposable plastic cutlery will literally outlive us students," the MGC student sustainability committee reiterated.
No system of sanctions has been put in place, because the initiative aims to encourage common sense and draw on the sense of belonging to a community committed to a larger project.
This is not the first initiative organised by students in Melbourne: in July they had launched the hashtag #plasticfreejuly, staging a kind of dress rehearsal for this more ambitious project.
In 2018, a similar initiative had seen an English school in Brighton, in the United Kingdom, ban the use of plastic bottles, straws and disposable cups in an attempt to reduce the amount of waste produced. On that occasion too, the idea had come directly from the students, who, however, unlike their Australian "counterparts", had decided to penalise offenders with fines similar to those imposed on smokers.
The initiative did not come about by chance, but arrives at a very specific moment in the history of this institution. According to what reported by teacher Paula McIntosh, the students said they were inspired by the actions of Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist, and want to play an active part in solving the problem of pollution.
Moreover, the recent financial crisis that struck Skm Australia, the company responsible for managing most of Australia's waste, has left the country in a precarious situation. Its directors were forced to declare bankruptcy and, as a result, the company will no longer be able to process waste for various local councils. For this reason the students decided to remove even the twenty recycling bins for plastic and glass, because the collapse of Skm is equivalent to throwing all waste together into landfill, with no possibility of recycling it.
The students became particularly engaged with the issue and realised they could make a difference. Following the school initiative, they called loudly on supermarket chains and large retailers to support their project and provide solutions that reduce the amount of waste produced.
"The reason they are doing this is clear — they are all aware of the problem, and in this way they will face much less opposition," said Geoffrey Binder, a professor at the University of Melbourne and sustainability expert. In his view, the key to the success of this initiative is precisely the timing, because right now everyone is engaged with the issue and no one is questioning what the problem is.
Discover the LifeGate PlasticLess initiative
There has been no shortage of criticism from those who have accused the school of simply "shifting" the problem from its own walls to those of students' homes, alluding to the fact that it is impossible to buy products without generating waste.
Listen to the words of the Mgc headteacher on the initiative
The institution defended itself by countering that the fundamental point of their project is to encourage the use of recyclable products and to try, at least, to find a solution. Success obviously depends on the common sense of the students and their parents, who should not buy packaged products and throw the packaging away at home, but should instead apply their ingenuity to find alternative solutions.
Once again, young people prove themselves open to change and willing to make some sacrifices for the wellbeing of the planet. The idea of a single school can thus become the winning solution to a global problem.
