Go Greener

Active Citizenship for the Environment – Clean Up Australia Day                                          

Clean Up Australia Day is an annual event organised across Australia where community members work together to collect waste from local areas and improve the natural environments which are so important for our collective wellbeing. This year the event will take place Sunday, 7 March.

The first Clean Up Australia Day was organised by cofounders Ian Kiernan and Kim McKay in 1989 to clean up Sydney Harbour. Mr Kiernan first alerted us to the problem of rubbish in our oceans when he participated in an around the world solo yacht race during 1986/87. The first Clean up Australia event was held in 1989 and it has now grown to include over 600,000 volunteers across more than 7000 locations in Australia each year. In the past 30 years, volunteers have donated more than 33 million volunteer hours of labour and removed over 350 thousand ute loads of rubbish from over 178,000 sites across the country.

Today the focus of the Clean Up Australia Day is as much on preventing rubbish entering our environment as it is removing what has already accumulated. The Clean Up Australia Day is the nation’s largest community based environmental event and helps people realise the connections between local pollution and the health of our oceans and marine life.

Participating in a Clean Up Australia Day event is a great way to show commitment and action towards a sustainable future. Support the health of your local environment, meet others or join with a group of friends to take part in a Clean up Australia event this year on Sunday 7 March.  You can register at the following website.

We would love to have photos of any SCEGGS girls participating in a Clean Up Australia Day event. Please forward any photos to Ms Jackson in the Primary School or Ms Zipfinger in the Secondary School.

Diane Jackson
Co-ordinator of Primary Enviro Girls