STUDENTS at St Mary’s School, Beaudesert, collected more than 40kg of old mobile phones, batteries and accessories to claim Queensland’s top spot in the annual MobileMuster Schools Recycling Challenge.
The small Catholic school collected the highest weight overall in the second round of the challenge, beating schools and colleges with much larger student populations.
St Mary’s student Jennifer Wynne also was named state student champion after she collected 299 individual handsets, the most collected by any student in Queensland.
The MobileMuster challenge is the official, free recycling program of the Australian telecommunications industry, aimed at preventing mobile phones ending up in landfill.
More than 540 schools across Australia registered to compete in the Schools Mobile Phone Recycling Challenge in 2010 with the winners announced at the start of 2011.
“Competition was fierce and St Mary’s results were outstanding,” MobileMuster manager for recycling Rose Read said.
Year 6 teachers Anita Mugridge and Sarah Field, who led the mobile phone collection, said after concentrating on a local project the previous year called Astonishing Art Made From Recycled Rubbish the students decided to do something bigger for their SOSE (Study of Societies and Environment) and religious units at school.
Ms Mugridge said that after they visited the Planet Ark website the students were astounded at the number of mobile phones Australians used each year and how many ended up in drawers at home or in landfill.
“We decided to it was time to ’round ’em up and hand ’em in’ as part of the MobileMuster Recycle Challenge,” she said.
“Students put messages up about the statistics about mobile use and the facts about mobile recycling in the school newsletter each week and we encouraged our school community to hand their old phone in to us.”
Ms Mugridge said the former Year 6 students felt satisfied they had done something practical to reduce the number of mobile phones going into landfill as well as being able to retrieve valuable natural resources so they could be reused and recycled.
“Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine we would be Queensland State School Champion for the highest weight collected,” she said.
As Queensland champions the school received a tree planting and school stationery pack valued at $500 and Jennifer took home a $100 environmental book pack for her efforts.
