Each year thousands of school students across Australia participate in Schools Clean Up Day to create a healthier environment for Australia and learn about ways to care for our beautiful country. Clean Up Australia Day started as Clean Up Sydney Harbour Day over 35 years ago with more than 40,000 people turning up to clean up the Harbour. Since then more than six million Australians have volunteered their time to help clean up their own local communities.

Plastic that ends up in nature can take up to 500 years to break down and its parts will last forever. Plastic is found in our deepest oceans and the most remote areas of our planet. We know this harms our incredible native animals as they eat it and become entangled in it, plastic pollutes and clogs our waterways, and damages the fragile environment of our parks and bush lands.

This year Australia’s largest community- based event saw over 10,000 Clean Ups and 2700 schools participate across the nation in an incredible show of community support.

At UPS our event started with a welcome and introduction from the Planet Protectors – sharing the history of the event, environmental facts, safety information and their personal pledge to protect our environment from waste. All the classes went on huge clean up to pick up all the rubbish in our school and did an amazing job! We made sure that every yard, including all the out of bounds areas and around the school boundary had a class cleaning it up.

Thank you for your support Unley Primary School –  let’s continue our work together to improve and protect our environment, eliminating litter and ending waste.