By Oliver Winn
In a true display of great sustainable practice, the Wandin Yallock Primary School has been named as a finalist in the 2025 ResourceSmart Schools Awards.
First time finalists, the primary school was nominated for the Container Deposit Scheme Vic (CDS Vic) Excellence Award (Primary), where they could win prize money to fund further sustainability projects.
It all comes from the heroic efforts of The Enviro Squad, a team of staff and student leaders paving the way towards the school’s 2025 sustainability goals.
School garden specialist and sustainability leader Jillian Dowling, affectionately known as Farmer Jill, said the nomination showed the school’s actions were making a difference.
“It’s nice to feel recognised – it’s recognition for the work we are doing and the effort that the students are putting in.”
“But we’re just a small school, so while we may feel like it’s a little effort, it’s clearly making a difference,” she said.
Through a proactive approach to sustainable practices, Ms Dowling said the Enviro Squad students influenced others to do the same.
“The main thing that stood out for us was our Enviro Squad students started collecting the containers for CDS so that we could raise funds to encourage others to do the same.”
“They shared awareness so that our community could also help, we’ve had people deliver cans and bottles to us so that we could return them,” Ms Dowling said.
The school earned $500 from VICReturn for water tanks and raised over $400 from container collections, showing their sustainability practices are financially – you guessed it – sustainable.
One purchase the Enviro Squad team had made with the funds they’d earned was the plush sea turtle Mascot, fittingly dubbed Eco by the students.
“Oh, you’ve got to have a plushie. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s a given.”
Ms Dowling said Eco the turtle helped encourage the students to get involved in sustainable practices – one of the student’s ideas was a class lunchbox competition, where the classroom with the least amount of lunchbox waste gets to look after Eco for the week.
The staff at Wandin Yallock Primary School are all incredibly supportive of the students.
Teachers encouraged students to be ‘waste warriors’ during recess and to always strive to keep the environment clean.
But they also validated the student’s ideas when it comes to sustainable solutions, which promotes healthy leadership while curating a comfortable environment for peers to share ideas.
“It’s their voice and we’re quite proud of our student voice, so they talk about what’s important to them or what they think will really work in our school environment.”
“So they get to choose and then they act on it and we just sort of support them doing that,” Ms Dowling said.
Sustainability Victoria director of regions and community action Katie Pahlow said collaboration is crucial
“We can achieve so much more when we work together, whether that’s with other students, other schools, other teachers, or the wider community beyond the school gate. By working together, our efforts combine to build the future we need.”
ResourceSmart Schools is a free Victorian Government program offered by Sustainability Victoria delivering sustainability education to help Victorian schools minimise waste, save energy and water, promote biodiversity and act on climate change.
Since ResourceSmart Schools’ inception in 2008, the program has reached 1,600 Victorian schools, planted more than 5.1 million trees, saved over $63 million through energy, waste and water savings, diverted 170,000 cubic metres of waste from landfill and avoided over 110,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The year’s winners will be announced at the coveted awards ceremony held at the MCG on 5 June.
