All right. The learners from three schools in the Athlone area have this year become recycling champions and eco ambassadors as part of a project, a pilot project to ensure that recyclable items are diverted from landfills. The project, involving Normal Road, q Town and Alistair Primary schools, was run by Zero Waste Solution Company which Regionize and in partnership with the Producer Responsibility Organization PETCO and from their marketing manager,
Kay Levy joins us. Oh sorry, Carra, Kara. Kara Levy joins us this afternoon, Kara, good to have you with us.
Thank you so much for having me. How did this.
Project get started, Kara? And why the decision particularly for these to target these three schools.
So we have been a longtime partner with REGIONIS as PITTCO. It's our responsibility to look after and make sure that the packaging that our members place on the market is collected and recycled. So we have for a long time had their partnership with Regionized and we were talking and they have a large interest from many of the schools that they are collecting from and they approached us and asked us if we could or would be willing to
support the project, and we said absolutely. When you know there is interest from a school, or particularly from teachers or principal at a school, we like to jump on board because that means that there's somebody that will be holding the project accountable and running with it. And so we jumped right in and with our third partner, which is green Pop, we worked out a whole little mechanism and ecosystem for the.
Competition and it was right as you say, run as a competition. Tell us how the learners did in terms of weight, So they.
Did really well. It was kind of split into two parts. First part was well it was Grade R to Grade three and then it was Grade four to Grade seven and over all they collected just under seven hundred kilograms of recyclable packaging, so that means that all of that packaging was diverted from landfall. We've got a big landfall crisis in South Africa where a lot of our landfalls are filling up really quickly. A lot of them are
so for that they have already actually closed down. So that is one of the main aims of the work that we do, making sure that that valuable packaging states out of landfall, out of the environment and gets made into new useful products.
So maybe you can talk a little bit to that the message of sustainability. What how, how have you sort of passed that message on to the learners and how are they then passing it on to their communities.
So we've got various initiatives in place. We've got a partnership with clipig and Pace School's Club where we've created capsuligned content in the form of workbooks and posters, where parents and teachers are able to actually go to our website orto that we can pay School's Club website and download content. But specifically for this competition, we had people who work with Regionized go to the school and actually introduce the competition and give that information to the kids.
And what the kids needed to then do is to actually go home and make sure that they were separating their packaging from organic waste or waste that would go to landfall, and then they needed to bring that to school and from their Regionized would collect it. So it creates a whole nice ecosystem because there's the buzz that's created at school, then that message goes home to the parents. The kids are energized and excited about winning the competition.
That's school and the parents then have to listen to their kids to make their kids happy, I guess, and to start separating at home. So we hope that this will have a longer term impact once the parents and the kids now have kind of brought into why it is so important to actually separate your refactable packaging from ways.
Why do you see the project or the venture going in the future. Are their plans to expand it to.
Tom Absolutely so. We are currently still in talks with where the project will go. We are hoping to expand it further. We've got lots of learnings from this from these three pilot schools. Unfortunately, some people in the area, you know, because this packaging is worth something. If a wastepicker is able to get this sort of packaging, they
can sell it at a buyback center for money. So they actually founded some of the materials were stolen from the school, and so that was a good learning for us that we need to make sure that the packaging
is kept in a more secure location. But I mean, over all, the kids were so excited and a lot of the people who actually ran the project, some of the people that were working for Rege ANDIZM who conducted the project, was so inspired by how excited the kids were and the results that they are really excited to hopefully roll out more of these or roll up the initiative to more schools. So yeah, we're in box, is the main answer for you there. Yes, we are definitely
going to be doing more on the ground. Well.
In enormous congratulations to the learners that those schools, Normal Road, qu Town and Alistair Primary in Athlone for their efforts and certainly recycling champions, and also delighted to have you Kara with us this afternoon talking to us about the role of PETCO in this Lara sorry cart Levy is from PETCO, which is South Africa's longest standing producer responsibility organization.