If anyone can make composting exciting its Costa Georgiadis.
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The host of ABC Gardening Australia and ambassador for International Compost Awareness Week visited Urquhart Park Primary School on Friday to spread the message of reduce, reuse and refuse.
Composting is one piece of the overall sustainable Australia picture. But for Mr Georgiadis, the first step is to inspire our youth.
“If we can build a connection in their heart then they will really understand and stand up for nature,” he said.
“Otherwise if we are just punitively teaching them to ‘put this there’, ‘do that do this’, then all we are doing is filling their heads with information that will turnover like the next news feed. It is important they see how their choices are responsible for damage up the chain.”
Urquhart Park Primary School is a part of the ResourceSmart Schools Program, adopting a commitment to embed sustainable principles into school life.
The school’s sustainability captains and green team are working to achieve five star certification based on biodiversity, energy, waste, water and curriculum alignment to sustainability.
Urquhart Park Primary School sustainable gardening kitchen teacher Kerry Hartmann said students had been learning the importance of turning food scraps and organic garden waste into compost.
“The rich nutrients in the compost we generate improves the quality of the soil in our garden beds,” she said.
“Composting reduces the amount of kitchen waste going into landfill, negates the need to use artificial fertilisers and encourages compost worms in our gardens.”
Grampians Central West Waste and Resource Recovery Group will run more than 25 workshops and demonstrations on composting and worm farms around the region in May.
The group opened a new composting area at Livvi’s Place Inclusive Playspace at Victoria Park on Friday as part of the Victorian launch of International Composting Awareness Week.
GCWWRRG executive officer La Vergne Lehmann said it was time organic matter was thought of as a resource, not waste.
“Around 30 to 40 per cent of what is in most people’s landfill bins is organic material going into landfill,” she said.
“It is a resource we can use to put back into soils. If you create a good compost you have got a great fertiliser, and it will help things grow in your veggie patch or your garden. If it goes to landfill all it does is it degrade and releases methane into the air.”
“It is a little bit like the recycling issues. All of those things are perfectly good materials we can do something else with, we just have to work out how.”