The brightly decorated recycling bin at Harris Park Preschool is almost as big as the young students who eagerly fill it up with bottles and cans to cash in at Return and Earn.
Their goal is to raise $500 to build a street library in front of Harris Park Preschool in Queanbeyan.
Director Ashley Hugill said the container recycling project began after a council representative gave a talk to the preschoolers about rubbish.
“The children had lots of questions about ‘where rubbish goes’ and to build on that we decided to collect bottles and cans and deliver them to Return and Earn,” Ashley explained.
“We have always been a very sustainable preschool with lots of projects like gardening and local walks. So, we decorated a bin we had in our shed with lids and now we use that to collect the cans.”
The enterprising preschoolers also put flyers about their project in the letterboxes of surrounding homes during a neighbourhood walk.
“We’re getting a lot of community members coming and dropping off big bags of bottles,” Ashley said.
“The children and their families and the staff bring their bottles and pop them in, so it has been filling up really quickly.”
The bounty of containers was too great for the little recyclers to take in a single visit to the local Return and Earn machine.
“We couldn’t carry it all at the same time - it is quite a large bin - so we could only take half of it. The weekly walk to the Return and Earn machine is also an educational opportunity for the little learners,” Ashley said.
“We talk about road safety, and we talk about the different things we see. The class we took the other day have done a big project on map making so they have a map of where they have gone.
“We might talk about animals and nature or collect leaves and sticks that we bring back with us,” said Ashley.
A recent visit to return eligible containers for the 10c refund raised $45 for the book library.
Ashley said the children are following their savings to the $500 goal: “We’ve got a tracker and we are colouring it in as we progress, so it is a very visual way to see where we are up to.”
