Kangaroo Valley Public School wins prize in national recycling challenge

The school won one of the four prizes drawn at random at the conclusion of the Colgate Community Garden Challenge.

Run through a partnership between Colgate, Chemist Warehouse and global recycling innovators TerraCycle, the Colgate Community Garden Challenge invited all pre, primary, intermediate, special and secondary schools in Australia to register, collect and ship all their oral care waste to TerraCycle who will turn it into new products.

In the three years that the challenge has run, more than 500,000 toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes and dental floss containers have been diverted from landfill (equivalent to nearly five tonnes of oral care).

READ MORE:

Seven schools across the country won prizes; the top three collectors and four drawn at random.

The prize includes a garden bed, bench with planter boxes, and picnic table all made with recycled oral care waste, plus a $200 Bunnings Warehouse voucher, bringing each school's prize value to just over $5000.

Years 2, 3, and 4 at Kangaroo Valley Public released a statement that said winning this prize means a completely new extra garden bed that they can use to plant more herbs, vegetables and possibly fruits for their kitchen garden program.

"We let our students know of the recycling program and we told the community about it so that they could join in and be part of the recycling efforts," they said.

"Many of us didn't even know that we could recycle toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes and floss containers but we knew about recycling the cardboard containers.

"We will keep on bringing in our old toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes so that we can keep them out of landfill."

Throughout this year's competition, more than 72,000 votes were cast online for the participating schools and more than 82,000 pieces of oral care waste were shipped to TerraCycle.

TerraCycle will sort, shred, wash and melt the waste down into plastic pellets to be used in the manufacture of new products such as garden beds, park benches and playgrounds.

Colgate Palmolive vice president and general manager of South Pacific Julie Dillon said she was impressed by how much was collected by schools during a challenging year.

"When COVID hit and schools closed we were unsure how this would affect the competition," she said.

"However we ended up with more community votes than last year, reflecting the potential of an initiative like this to pull a community together in tough times."

Chemist Warehouse Group COO Mario Tascone congratulated the students at Kangaroo Valley School on their amazing efforts in recycling oral care waste in 2020 and winning garden equipment for their school.

"We are thrilled to have partnered with Colgate and TerraCycle on this exciting initiative which diverted 82,000 pieces of oral care waste from landfill in 2020, while encouraging and engaging students in the practice of recycling and sustainability," he said.

General manager of TerraCycle Australia and New Zealand Jean Bailliard said that in addition to showing how recycled materials could be used as a sustainable alternative to virgin plastic, he hoped the community garden sets would promote healthy living at the winning schools.

"We've been very encouraged by the increasing number of requests from schools for information about recycling and sustainability," he said.

"The popularity of this competition shows that, with the support of conscientious companies such as Colgate, bringing the community together to care for our planet can be rewarding not only for our environment but also for the schools involved."

The Colgate Community Garden Challenge is part of a broader Oral Care Recycling Program, which has now diverted more than 1.3 million pieces of oral care waste from landfill in Australia.

We depend on subscription revenue to support our journalism. If you are able, please subscribe here. If you are already a subscriber, thank you for your support.