A RE-USABLE drink bottle will be provided to all 153 students at Bundanoon Public School.
The funds were raised by the P&C for the blue drink bottles by opening the canteen on a Friday.
The children will receive the bottles at the beginning of next term.
P&C member Brigette Muir said the P&C decided to go bottled water free more than a year ago.
“It was decided to support the local businesses and community,” she said.
“Bundanoon has beautiful water.
“If every child has a re-usable drink bottle we would save on our own landfill, as well as lessen our school’s carbon footprint.”
At a public meeting earlier this month, more than 350 people endorsed Bundanoon businesses’ decision to remove bottled still water from their shelves from September.
Culligan Water has also donated three $6000 filtered water fountains to the community.
One of those was donated to the school and will be installed around September or October.
The children will be able to use the fountain to refill their bottles.
Mrs Muir said her children think no bottled still water is a great idea.
“It gets them discussing the environment and the impact on the environment,” she said.
“As a small school what we can do... we can really make a difference.”
Lisa Reid, also a P&C member, added that hopefully the stance on bottled water would have a snowball effect.
“It is teaching the children they can make a difference,” she said.
“Encouraging them to have a social conscience.”
Bundanoon Public School principal Robyn Versluis said the children are very excited about having their own water bottle.
“It is about making a good choice and reusing things,” she said.
The children are environmentally aware and are encouraging reuse themselves. In 2007 the Student Representative Council (SRC) did an audit of rubbish at the school.
They did an examination of the litter on the ground.
They found that 90 per cent of the rubbish on the school grounds was the little plastic wrap from straws off poppas.
Mrs Versluis said because they come off so easily, children didn’t know that they had dropped them.
“They looked at two things to how could they get rid of that plastic being a litter problem,” she said.
“They also looked at the amount of garbage that was created by the poppas themselves.
“When we looked at the garbage on a Friday there was an enormous number of packets that had been packaged into small amounts... like small yoghurt containers, little sultana packets.
“After they did the audit they talked with the children and said ‘we see an obvious solution in buying small plastic containers that you decant’.
“A family buys a big can of yoghurt and puts it in a smaller container to bring to school each day.
“We have been doing that actively for two years... our rubbish was remarkably reduced from the SRC’s campaign.”
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