HOPE: Mutual Support Partner

Kingfisher Centre

Aspley Special School’s waste minimisation program commenced in 1980 to provide an in-school work experience program for the School’s students, all of whom had moderate to severe intellectual disabilities. Many students also have considerable physical disabilities.
The waste minimisation program is based on sorting articles for reuse or recycling. However, the program’s primary objectives are educational and therapeutic.

“The active participation of people in the work of their society, rather than their displacement from it, strikes me as a pre-condition for the development of any sane and sustainable society”        by Jonathon Porritt, “Seeing Green.”

Kingfisher Recycling Centre is open 24 hours a day / 7 days a week, to accept recyclables. These recyclables are sorted for reuse and recycling during school hours and during the school terms by some 100 students with disabilities from Aspley and other Special Schools, “at risk” primary and high school students, and young people on community service orders. They are assisted by our V.I.Ps (Volunteers In Partnership) – past Aspley Special School students and other adult volunteers at Kingfisher Centre, including a wonderful group of mainly retirees, who keep Kingfisher Centre in good shape over the school holidays. Teaching staff and volunteers now perform 400 hours work at the Centre each week. Please contact us if you would like to help.

Processing these recyclables is labour intensive and teaches the students basic work skills:-

• to work safely
• to co-operate
• to stay on task
• to be happy and enjoy work.

In the initial program, the students collected aluminium cans from the local community and then crushed the cans at school using basic hand-operated can crushers. The program raised $25 in the first year. In this “hands on” project, the students were able to “learn by doing”.

The program was extremely popular with the students, and was expanded after three years so that the public could drop off at the school’s recycling area a wide range of household recyclables that the students could safely process, either for REUSE, or less importantly, RECYCLING. But we only accepted those materials that the students could easily process and for which there were genuine, viable markets nearby. At $1000 per tonne compared with $20 per tonne for cardboard, paper and glass, aluminium is the only common material that one can viably transport any distance to its recycling facility.

The program flourished, and by 1992 had raised $45,000; enough to build Kingfisher Centre adjacent to the school grounds on Education Department Land in a scenic natural bush setting. The purpose built $92,000 activities building was built with a 50% subsidy from Education Queensland. Kingfisher Centre is built along the lines of a service station and comprises of a large roofed cement floor area, an office/kitchen area, a storage area to house the Centre’s small recycling utility, and two disabled person’s toilets and showers.

The natural lighting, cooling, low maintenance aspects and the congenial windowless view to the north, south and east are important environmentally-friendly aspects of this low cost, easily replicated activities building.

The Centre now generates up to $20,000 per year, and is the most comprehensive school community recycling station in the world. This is not a great income for up to 100 participants who perform close to 400 hours work or work-experience every week. However if you include issues of social cohesion and environmental benefits from minimising the waste of available human and material resources as occurs at Kingfisher Centre, an income of $20,000 is quite encouraging.

This I believe is the vital shift in thinking embodied in the Edmund Rice Business Ethics Awards, where we start to judge a high quality nation by the quality of the lives of its children, its disabled, its disadvantaged, its elderly citizens and its non-voting members. A truly civilised nation would treat people with very high support needs in a just manner, be they young people or very elderly citizens.

Special School students learn by doing. Many of our students are reluctant to stop their chosen task until they have finished their task, even working through their lunch break. They do so because they enjoy doing the task that they can accomplish so effectively. If you are unable to read, write, count to ten, speak, cross roads and require assistance with toileting, feeding and clothing yourself, why should you not be given the opportunity to do useful work? At the Recycling Facility, the public sees what they can do, rather than what they can’t do.

$7,000 funds generated from our waste minimisation initiative have been used to purchase a recycling utility which is used to collect glass bottles and jars and aluminium cans, trays and foil from 80 local hotels, motels, caravan parks, retirement villages and car-free local residents.

Other funds generated have been used towards the construction of the school’s community indoor therapy pool; $17,000 for a solar heater to heat the pool; $7,000 for a storage shed for refillable glass bottles and jars and furniture removalists cardboard cartons; two shade houses and a potting shed where the students, with volunteers’ assistance, pot up local native plants for bush regeneration purposes for a community nursery. Many of these plants will be used for an on-going creek-bank revegetation project linking the school, high school and university. Funds raised also pay for running costs and wages to enable the recycling utility to perform two recycling collection runs each week.

Visitors to Kingfisher Centre see how the Centre works – the “nuts and bolts” of the operation. They are also introduced to the environmental education concepts involved under the 3 R’s regime.

• Number 1.      REDUCE both consumption and waste, given that a 1% reduction in consumption is thought to be equal to a 25% recycling rate.
• Number 2.      REUSE an article again and again and again, for its original manufactured Purpose eg. Refillable glass container, plastic lunch box or wheelie bin.
• Number 3.      RECYCLE something if REDUCE and REUSE are not options, if it is easy to recycle and if there is a genuine market close by for the material we want to recycle.

Today we RECYCLE to manage our waste as an “end of pipe” solution.

To minimise our waste we need to REDUCE and REUSE and apply these “front end” solutions to cut our waste of human and material resources.

So, before you “shop till you drop”, think of the manufacturing costs and try to buy durable, reusable, Australian products, and try to avoid buying products that are used once and then thrown away. The future is what you choose.

Items accepted by the facility are:

• glass bottles and jars, preferably with lids on. (We do not accept any flat glass or windscreen glass.)
• all cardboard,
• newspaper,
• white paper,
• junk mail,
• egg cartons,
• envelopes with or without stamps on them,
• books and magazines.
• phone books;
• aluminium cans, trays and foil. (Aluminium is incredibly expensive to manufacture in energy and transport terms, but is very easy and cost effective to recycle)
• bottle corks as a fund raiser for the Girl Guides. (They cannot recycle the new plastic corks, which are leading to cork farmers in Europe digging out their cork trees which have been farmed sustainably for hundreds of years.
• clothing, rags and Hessian through various charities that have their collection bins at the Centre.
• spectacles (which are passed on to Lions Clubs who send these valuable items to less developed nations)
• 5 and 10 cent coins. (These are collected and the funds thus generated are sent to a school in East Timor for students with disabilities)
• car and truck batteries;
• non ferrous metals;
• plastic plant pots;
• jiffy post bags;
• toner cartridges

The facility does not accept any waxed cartons or milk cartons. If one has any concerns about global warming, the greenhouse gas generated in transporting high quality waxed paper carton board from the other side of the world to be used for a single use milk carton is phenomenal.

The facility does not accept any plastics. Plastics are durable, light weight materials which are ideal for applications requiring long life, durability and light weight – plastic lunch boxes, wheelie bins and telephones are excellent examples of suitable plastic products. In a world borrowed from future generations, it seems extremely questionable to use a durable, long life material like plastic for short term single use products. It appears difficult to co-mingle the 60 different types of plastic for recycling purposes. We were receiving 17 wool bales full of mixed plastic junk every week which we had to transport to the local landfill site as a hidden inheritance for future generations and grounds around the Centre became a huge sea of plastic bags, some of the 6.9 billion plastic bags we dump in Australia every year.

Plastic plant pots are a great haven for red back spiders which, courtesy of global warming, appear to be thriving. The warmer winters and drier weather have been a disaster for the red back spider’s parasitic wasp, and this spider can now breed three times a year rather than once. The money made from global warming hardly seems worth the price we pay. The (1992 or 1996) inquiry into “Recycling in Australia” suggested that recycling P.E.T. was a “nett cost to society”.

We found steel cans difficult to collect for recycling. Some steel cans were dropped off half full of pet food. Engine blocks and scrap steel items were also dumped, and none of these steel items are readily handled by people with very high support needs.

We have avoided any recyclable “sandwich” material such as poppa juice containers. Sandwich materials are very costly to recycle.

Climate destabilisation is making us think about the choices we make if we want to sustain the world that sustains us, our children and their children. It is put neatly by Paul Hawken in his excellent book The Ecology of Commerce – “We must take less (from the earth), make less, waste less and want less.”

Our Environmental Education Program is designed for visitors from pre-schools, primary or high school groups, business delegations and groups of overseas students, in particular from Japan, and our workshops include a 5 minute video presented out in the community by the Centre’s waste minimisation co-ordinator.

This project has been taken on three lecture tours to Japan, courtesy of the Science Education Foundation of Japan, and was one of only 18 global presentations at the First International Children’s Conference on the Environment in the UK in 1995.

List of Awards Received:

• Keep Australia Beautiful Council (Qld) (1st prize Category – Special 1988 Tidy Schools Contest;
• E.A. Butt (Environmental Award – 1988)
• Comalco Aluminium Ltd (1st prize – 1989 – Performance Collecting Aluminium Cans)
• Griffith Uni – Division of Aust. Environmental Studies – Encouragement Award 1989
• E.A. Butt Award (Environmental Award – 1990)
• Top State – Queensland (Environment Award – 1990)
• Banksia Award – (Community Groups – 1991 & 1994)
• Comalco Aluminium Ltd (1st prize – 1991 – School’s Aluminium Can Recycling Program)
• The Great Garbage Grab (1st prize – Division 2 – 1992)
• Griffith University – (Environment Award for Youth – 1993)
• The Great Garbage Grab – (1st Prize – Division 2 – 1993)
• ABC Earthworm Awards for Science – (1st Prize)
• Griffith Uni Faculty of Environmental Sciences – (Environmental Education Award 1994)
• One of only 18 global presentations at United Nations 1st International Children’s Conference on the Environment – (1995)
• Brisbane City Council – (Water Savers Award – 1997)
• Edmund Rice Business Ethics Awards – (Finalist 1998)
• Quest Community Newspapers – (Business Achievers Award – 2001 – Community Services)
• NAB Qld Community Link Volunteer Award – (Winner 2002)
• ARC Qld Recycled Cartonboard Competition – (Winner 2002)

• Do yourself, your children and your community a favour and buy a rainwater tank. And one morning you will wake to the sounds of a saner, more sustainable and less wasteful past era. You’ll be awakened by the soft sound of falling rain, precious water gurgling into the tank and the green tree frog in the downpipe echoing its excitement about the arrival of one of four basic needs.

• Fit a water shower rose, have less baths and shorter showers. In the hotter weather, if you’re fair dinkum about saving water, why not try a Gandhi shower? Wet your body in the shower, turn off water, soap your body and shampoo your hair then turn on the water again to rinse off the soap and shampoo.
• If your dirty hands are not oily or greasy, cold water and soap and a nailbrush will clean your hands effectively.
• Use just a couple of glasses of water to clean your teeth and rinse your toothbrush, it’s far better than running the tap for the whole tooth brushing process.
• Put boiling water in a container when shaving, rather than just running the hot tap.
• Install tap aerators, fix leaking taps and use tight fitting plugs.

• If you don’t have a dual flush toilet, place a brick or plastic bottle filled with water inside the toilet cistern, to cut down the amount of water it uses.
• In Japan, hand-washing is used to flush toilets. The toilet cistern lid is dished with a hole in the middle, with the filler pip above the lid. So you flush the toilet and then wash your hands in the water stream above the cistern as the cistern fills up again. Brilliant simplicity.
• In the workplace, press button flush urinals waste less water than automatic flush urinals.

• Wash as many kitchen articles as possible in cold water, use hot water to remove grease from dirty kitchen utensils and plates etc.
• If you want hot water, collect the cold water first in a bowl of water. Place the bowl of water near the sink. This is useful if you need to quickly rinse your hands at different times in the day. Perhaps use the cold water for washing the vegetables, then reuse this water on the garden.
• Re-use hot water – hot water for boiling eggs can be used for washing up. Hot water for cooking vegetables can be used to remove most of the grease from a dirty fry pan.
• Boiling potatoes in a little water and steaming other vegetables in a top steamer on top of the potatoes is a great way to save water. Better still, have a salad (more nutritious too) and avoid using water cooking most vegies.
• If you need a small amount of hot water, boil a jug or saucepan rather than turning on the hot tap.
• Wash up as much as possible in one session. If you must use a dishwasher try to only use it for a full load.
• Only boil as much water as you need. Boil foods in saucepans with lids on and save having to top up water that evaporates.
• Re-use water used for cooking. Veggie cooking water can be reused for soups, also more nutritious.
• Ensure your hot water system and pipes are well insulated. Set hot water thermostat only up to 60 degrees Centigrade. Turn off your hot water system when you go on holidays.
• Keep bottles of tap water in the fridge and keep refilling the same bottle; this is far cheaper than continually buying expensive bottled water in a single use.

• When you buy a new washing machine, a front loader washing machine uses far less water and energy than a top load washing machine. Try to buy a quality product that is reliable and repairable.
• Wash a full load. Use cold water unless the clothes are very greasy or oily.
• Recycle washing machine water when possible. When spin-drying soapy clothes, return the suds to the washing tub so that they can be used for a second family wash. Also rinse water could be used on the garden, the lawn or to wash the car.
• Why can’t more rinsing water be used to flush toilets?

• Install a rainwater tank. Check out with your local council to find out if you qualify for a council rebate on the water tank. How long before new houses have rainwater tanks hooked up to hot water systems and for flushing toilets as well as for garden uses?
• The garden is an area where you can very easily make massive savings of water, if you choose to have a genuine Australian garden. Plant local, locally grown Australian ground covers, shrubs, vines and small trees. If you buy locals Australian plants in small tubs from local community or Council nurseries, they are inexpensive and can flourish with minimal water, if you thickly mulch the garden beds and if you give the plants 6 or 8 thorough initial waterings.
• If you really want to save water, first prepare each planting site and only plant your chosen plants in the ground 2 or 3 days after soaking rain, while the entire garden is still moist.
• Your own veggie garden and a few of your favourite fruit trees will require a lot more water than the hardy, local native garden, so mulch the veggie garden and the fruit trees and water the plants roots, not the leaves deeply, less frequently (twice a week in a dry summer).
• Water in the early morning or evening, preferably when it’s not windy. A drip irrigation system puts the water where the plants need it, in the root zone, but a thick layer of mulch will cut evaporation loss by up to 70%. Try to avoid using a sprinkler system in the middle of a hot, sunny, windy day.
• Check the weather forecast before you water the garden. In case it’s about to rain.
• Use a broom, not the hose to clean paths and use a bucket rather than the hose to clean the car. Try to clean the car on a grassed area rather than on the road or cement area.
• Finally, when you head off on your holiday turn off your water at the meter, in case your water pipes are leaking.

To borrow a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” – “Water, water everywhere, but not (much of) a drop to drink”.

97% of the world’s water is salt water. 3% only is freshwater and most of the fresh water is unavailable, locked away frozen in the polar ice caps. Less than 1% of the world’s water is available for our use.

The future is what you choose. So how much water you use in your home is directly up to you. Water is one of our four basic needs and the ultimate question is this. To what extent are you prepared to change your WANTS, to satisfy your basic NEEDS?

Paul Hawken in his excellent book “The Ecology of Commerce” puts it this way. “We must take less (from the Earth), make less, waste less and want less”. So if you really want to save water, think about what you buy.

A tonne of recycled paper or cardboard saves 31 780 litres of water, so why not recycle your paper and cardboard and demand and buy recycled paper.

Thanks to our local papers for launching water saving projects in 2003, the International Year of the Freshwater.

Most of the above and other basic waste saving ideas comes from three excellent sources,

• “Smallternatives” – Smallternatives Working Group. 1979. Second Back Row Press P.L.
• “2 Minutes To A Greener Planet”. – Marjorie Lamb. 1990. Collins Dove, Burwood, Victoria.
• “P.A.G.F.T.E.” – 1989 Commission for the Future. Aust. Govt. Publishing Service, GPO Box 84, Canberra ACT 2601

Contact Us

HARRY JOHNSON
Recycling Co-ordinator
Kingfisher Centre
PO Box 67 Zillmere Qld 4034
29 Dorville Road Aspley
Ph: (07) 3263 2655
Fax: (07) 3263 7802
 Email: admin@aspleyspecs.qld.edu.au