Our Environment

In the Garden

On Friday afternoons our resident Gardener comes in to lead our Year 5 children in a hands on gardening session. The children have enjoyed planting, caring for and harvesting a huge variety of produce and their efforts result in a termly school lunch produced in our Garden to Table programme. On the menu has been – Pumpkin Soup, Zucchini Fritters, Salad, Rhubarb Crumble, Carrot Cakes, Rhubarb and Apple Muffins.

Eco Club

On Mondays at lunchtime, the ELFs (Environmental Leaders of the Future) meet to learn about environmental issues. The group discuss and plan ways we can support and improve our environment as well as taking action such as litter picking and promoting litterless lunches.

The ELF’s suggest:

• Try to use a lunch box that has separate sections so that food doesn’t need to be unnecessarily wrapped.
• Buy chips in a large family size bag and put a small handful into a reusable container.
• Use a drink bottle rather than bringing drink cartons.

Wastewise

In 2014, after 2 years of being on a sustainability programme run by the Auckland Council Mt Carmel graduated and became a fully fledged Wastewise School. The programme is designed to help reduce a school’s waste and ecological footprint, engaging the children in real life learning opportunities. While on the programme some of the steps we took to improve our sustainability were: introducing food scrap bins, extending our worm farms, carrying out waste audits to help plan how we could reduce our waste, hosting ‘nude food’ days and taking part in the Sustainable Coastlines project. Our success is measured every year during our Wastewise Audit when we see an ever decreasing amount of non-recyclable waste. In 2012 this weighted 4kg and this year it was reduced to just 0.68kg.

Solar Energy

Mt Carmel is now on Solar Power thanks to an initiative run by Vector Energy. Mrs Masters nominated Mt Carmel in a competition to receive free solar panel energy for 10 years and thanks to the many, many votes we received from our community we were fortunate enough to win. Our Tesla battery and solar panels were at long last installed in August 2016 and we are monitoring our savings monthly so we can report back on their success.