Are you a teacher, student or parent and looking for free zero waste education resources, or ideas to keep your kids happy? Here are a range of lesson plans, printable worksheets, patterns, recipes, games and fun ideas that can be used for learning at home, online learning, small children and general household use.
The first free zero waste resources are two lesson packs are based around Home Bin Audits and Fabric Reusables. These lesson plans are mapped to the Australian curriculum and can be used for most ages from kindy to early high school, so they’re also great for homeschooling a group of siblings. The printable worksheets are designed to be low-ink and can be printed in black and white, and can be used for reluctant writers. Activities include a movie review with suggestions, rubbish walk, bin audit (with different methods depending on age and ability), designing and sewing six fabric items, brainstorming solutions and a fibre bingo game. Students are prompted to think about ethics of single use plastic and use systems thinking, as well as math, English, design & technology, HASS, arts and science skills.
If you have small children at home, you are probably struggling to avoid plastic toys and sensory play! Some children love to play with oozy slime and goo, but all the commercial versions are packed in plastic and even the homemade recipes use PVA glue and other ingredients you probably don’t want on your child’s skin. Here is a recipe sheet with four fun sensory things to make, a list of ideas to make a sensory tub and a simple sheet of seasonal play activities.
And here’s one for the adults – did you do more cooking in 2020 but find that you were missing just one ingredient for the recipe? Print this out for your pantry door. It’s a list of food substitutes so you can make that recipe with whatever you have in the cupboard.
Get your free Plastic Free July starter kit from Green Skills Albany during July, 2020! This little paper bag is full of information, vouchers, samples and freebies to get you started on your waste reduction journey. Drop into the office at 38 Graham Street, Centennial Park, Albany during 9-3 weekdays to pick up yours this month.
Plastic Free July is a challenge to refuse single use plastic for the month of July. Get tips, inspiration and sign up for the challenge here. You can also find resources here on the Green Skills website under our Resources tab. There is heaps you can do, even during these challenging pandemic conditions, to reduce single use plastic in your life.
Green Skills was pleased to support the City of Albany to run another successful Green Fair in November 2019. With a jam-packed schedule of demonstrations, speakers, workshops, displays, music and market stalls, there were plenty of sustainable skills to look at. The weather was looking stormy in the week prior but Saturday brought welcome sunshine. This year the event was spread over both sides of the library (and upstairs in the meeting rooms) due to the construction site next to the Albany Town Hall.
Adrian Price travelled from Boyup Brook to talk about upcycling ewaste, how to safely dismantle items for parts and the potential for selling components.
Sustainable Schools had several displays inside the library area. Several local schools also had their own stalls outside, and it was great to see the recycling and sustainability initiatives that are popping up.
Green Skills held a stall and answered questions about our Terracycle programs, bushland regeneration and other projects.
There were lots of volunteers and community groups on the day sharing their skills and knowledge. What did you learn?
The Albany office has been running a ‘Food is Free’ cart since 2017 at 38 Graham Street, inspired by the Food is Free laneway in Ballarat, VIC. Over the last two years, hundreds of kilograms of fruit and vegetables have been given away from this humble little upcycled cart. The Food is Free concept started in Austin, Texas and has now spread around the world with over 350 cities participating. It’s a great way to build community and connect excess food to people who can use it.
The Green Skills Albany office has several raised garden beds and grows seasonal vegetables when volunteer labour & staff energy allows. We currently have one volunteer working in our garden and have planted summer seedlings such as zucchini and tomatoes. Upcycled wicking beds in the front yard are a great way of keeping the vegies going through summer holidays with gaps in garden watering. The garden produce on the Food is Free cart mostly comes from the office gardens and staff home vegetable gardens.
You can participate by dropping off your own homegrown produce or taking whatever you find on the cart. Please don’t leave items that can blow away, such as egg cartons, as this location is windy. The cart has been on the verge in the past but it now lives under the veranda where it is shadier.
The Green Skills Food is Free cart is available to the community whenever the gates are open, which is roughly 9-3pm weekdays (may be earlier or later depending on staffing). Keep an eye out on our Facebook page for current offerings. While you’re there, you may want to bring your coffee pods, toothbrushes or old pens for recycling in the TerraCycle program.
You might even like to set up a Food is Free space or edible verge garden at your place. Find out how here.
Green Skills held a Slow Fashion Festival in June 2019 at Fossicker’s Tip Shed in Albany to showcase sustainable fashion around the Great Southern region.
What is Slow Fashion? Slow fashion, as opposed to fast fashion, is fashion that causes less harm to people and the environment. It could be expensive, handstitched, bespoke, organic garments; or a bargain unique op shop find. Our festival included market stalls from local businesses who are upcycling coffee pods to make jewellery, plaiting rag rugs, upcycling fabric into new garments, creating jewellery from wooden offcuts, reselling secondhand clothes, hand-felted hats, vintage wear, and information about our recently launched Repair Cafe Albany.
The global fashion industry has an impact on the environment through raw materials (cotton cultivation is one of the most pesticide and water intensive industries in the world), fibre processing chemicals and dyes polluting soil & water, landfill (the average Aussie throws out 23kg of textiles to landfill every year) and microfibres (most WA beaches are polluted with microscopic synthetic fibres). There is also a humanitarian impact as many clothing factories employ child or female workers in unsafe conditions for minimal pay in order to produce our cheap chainstore garments. You just can’t produce a new t-shirt for $3 (grow the fibres, process them into material, transport it, create the garment, and ship it around the world) without someone else paying the cost behind the scenes. Look for the hashtag #whomademyclothes to find out more.
What can you do about it? Jane Milburn, author of Slow Clothing, says ‘buy once, buy well’. Listen to her podcast here. If you can’t afford to buy ethical clothing, look for secondhand gear in op shops or online swap groups. Don’t buy new synthetic items. Keep the synthetic textiles you already have in circulation, but wash them as little as possible and consider buying a filter bag for your washing machine to decrease the microfibre shedding into the waste water (this usually ends up in oceans, hence microfibres washing up on our beaches).
You can also host a clothes swap to stop your unwanted clothes from going to landfill and get something new to you at the same time. Find out how here. Green Skills hosted a clothes swap as part of the Slow Fashion Festival and many garments exchanged hands. We did have a system with tokens, to try to make sure we didn’t end up with extra clothes at the end of the event, but there were a pile of left-overs. These will be used for future workshops.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Two workshops ran at the event; darning knitted jumpers and socks, and easy hand-dying garments with natural materials. Check out the Permadoll or Green Skills Facebook pages for more workshops.
Albany folk might be surprised to see the volume of clothing rescued from our local op shops. This work is done by a local couple, Max and Marianne Chester, who attended our event in time to see some of the discarded clothing being worn on the catwalk. They have been collecting quality clothing and textiles that was on the op shop floor, but needed to be moved on in order to fit new stock. This doesn’t even include clothing that is too torn or dirty to offer for sale in the first place. The clothing is packed into wool bale bags and transported to Perth, where it is sent around Australia or the world to places of need. Max currently collects fifty wool bales worth of textiles per week, just from Albany. This was previously going into our landfill.
The most lively part of this event was the fashion parade. Catherine Kinsella from Style Genie coordinated our lovely volunteer models, and stallholders generously provided some garments, as well as discarded clothing pulled out of the wool bales (AKA ‘The Wool Bale Range’). The fashion parade ran twice during the event, and Bob Symons and the team from ACE Camera Club captured the moments for us. Thanks to our models and all the other event volunteers who made this day wonderful.
