We care about our environment

Room 23 children have been picking up rubbish and helping to make our school grounds a cleaner and more pleasant place to be. We have collected bags of waste. Take a look at some of it.

Last weekend, Mrs Tuck, Miss Bland and myself went to the Ecofest Waka Walk. Ecofest is a month long festival of events to involve people in creative and fun sustainable activities. The Waka walk followed a path that Maori took to cross from the Waitemata Harbour at New Lynn to the Manukau Harbour at Green Bay. The walk started at Olympic Park near the stream. This stream comes from the Whau and is called Waitahurangi. It runs behind the commercial buildings and residential houses that line Portage Road. We walked all the way to Green Bay along Portage Road and we stopped to pick up rubbish along the way. It was fun and inspiring to hear plans for cleaning and planting the stream. The places where this has been started are quite beautiful.

Maori could only paddle part way up the stream before it became too narrow and then had to carry the waka overland. When we arrived at Green Bay, there was a real live waka waiting. But this waka was made from plastic bottles. AJ and his crew had paddled it down the Wanganui river to make a point about reusing waste. Incredible to think that these bottles can take hundreds of years to breakdown and that hundreds are discarded every second!

http://www.ecomatters.org.nz/what-s-on/ecowest-festival-2014/