Life cycles are interesting and fun. Tadpoles turn into frogs and caterpillars transform into beautiful butterflies.

We begin with a and an. Both are easy to carry and not very expensive. Once you finish eating, both items go on a journey; one is destructive and one becomes a part of the natural cycle.

First the apple. You eat your apple at school and toss the core into the Excelsior food scrap buckets. The students collect, chop and stir the scraps and feed it all to our worms.

The apple core has helped to feed the worms, reduce waste in bins and nourish our gardens. We grow fruit and vegetables in our garden. Sometimes we cook our produce and have a feast.

Now we look at the journey of our potato chip packet and your plastic lunch wrapper. The beginning of this story is very quick. You eat your chips and toss the packet into the bin at school. You do this with your sandwich wrap as well. These wrappers and other rubbish get collected by the council trucks which tip all the trash at a dumping site. Your wrapper and chip packet become buried by tons of other trash. They are not alone! There are thousands ………… millions of packets and bits of plastic. All are buried in different places around Perth, Australia and all over the planet.

Plastic is not broken down by worms and bacteria like your apple core. It lays in the pile of trash for around………. (Guess how long) 450 years !

But guess what ? After a long, long time, the plastic does begin to change. It breaks down into much smaller plastic bits. These bits get smaller and smaller and eventually after rain, wind and weathering, all the tiny bits begin floating and moving into our rivers. The tiny bits of plastic end up inside the stomachs of fish and other marine animals.

Rivers also eventually flow out to the sea. And our tiny bits of plastic begin to pollute the oceans. Have you seen the biggest floating rubbish pile in the world ? Check this out!

This pile of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean is as big as Texas. Nearly as big as Western Australia.

This is what happens when animals eat the plastic. Pretty sad!

Some people also have to live in these polluted places.

All this junk started as someone’s lunch wrapper, a snack, a toy, fishing nets and millions of other things. I don’t want my children and grandchildren eating toxic food. I don’t want birds, fish and animals dying because they tried to eat this junk, thinking it was food. Let’s do something at Excelsior to eliminate all the plastic in our lunchboxes!

What can we use to keep our food fresh and tasty? Brainstorm some ideas; Paper bags for sandwiches. Reuse the zip lock bags you already have. Use alfoil or baking paper to wrap your sandwich. Place your sandwich in a small lunch box. Can you think of more solutions?

Plan: * What do we need to do, to help mum and dad understand what our goal is ? * How can we achieve a NO PLASTIC LUNCH ZONE at Excelsior Primary School? * How will we know if we have reached our goal ? Other benefits: We save money for our school (less rubbish is collected). We save money for our families because we re-use plastic OR use other cheaper lunch wrappers. We save the animals and our home planet.

Let’s do it together!