How Green Are You? - CareforKids.com.au®

How Green Are You?
Simple ways to improve your environmental performance

As environmentalism and an increasing awareness about sustainability become mainstream, so an increasing number of child care providers are looking at ways to 'green-up' their operating practices.

The advantages of going green are manifold and include reduced costs, improved operational efficiencies, preferential status among families who value environmentalism, reduced waste, a rich source of education opportunities and of course a public commitment to the global cause.

In the USA child care centres are able to complete a complete a checklist to see how eco-healthy they are. The checklist also offers some useful ways of assessing your environmental performance in areas which you may not have considered such as pest management and cleaning products.

Even if you can't go completely green, there are ways to incorporate sound environmental management policies in the day-to-day operation of your service. However, it is important to take a whole of service approach to making changes so that the benefits are experienced across the board.

Some simple examples of easy changes you could make include going paperless in the back office, or at the least paper recycling, starting a scraps bucket and a worm farm in the kitchen, incorporating environmental education in your teaching program, encouraging parents to pack lunches with little or no wrappings for services which don't supply lunch and buying a rain water tank for the yard.

Initiating Change
The first step in going green is to develop a sustainability management plan; this involves reviewing your current practices to evaluate where you might be able to make improvements.

According to information on the ACECQA website the following steps could be undertaken when developing a sustainability management plan for your service.

develop a policy for your service
establish targets for a reduction in energy and water consumption
re-examine purchasing practices
implement a recycling program
re-examine waste management
implement behavioural change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
review cleaning practices, for example, reduce or remove the use of toxic chemicals in your service
develop a garden or vegetable patch
communicate environmental achievements and milestones with the local community and seek their input
participate in conservation activities conducted by the local community.

Conducting an 'environmental audit' of the sustainability practices that are already occurring at your service is a useful tool for developing a sustainability management plan. Services could also consider conducting an audit of their energy use, waste management, water consumption and chemical use. The Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection offers this tool as a way of evaluating your service's eco-efficiency.

The purpose of the audit is to guide staff through the process of initiating change by formalising targets, goals and practices. These targets can be useful for ensuring the service's commitment towards meeting goals, as strategies are clearly defined and broken down into more manageable components.

Securing Support
In order to ensure the success of any sustainability policies you wish to introduce you'll need to secure buy-in from all the groups involved. This means consulting with families about their concerns and priorities. Family and community members may also be a rich source of ideas and inspiration and are a valuable resource worth tapping in to.

The children under your care will also need to be consulted, talking to them about the environment and sustainability and about any changes being made which directly impact them in advance of the changes occurring will increase the likelihood of success. For example talking to them about the new worm farm which is on the way and then encouraging them to save their leftovers to feed the worms, then harvesting the compost and using it in the garden will give them great oversight and understanding of the small ways they can affect change.

Staff commitment will be the biggest factor in the success or failure of any new initiatives you introduce. Different levels of understanding among staff about environmental issues and sustainability could be an obstacle. For this reason it could be worth spending some of your training budget on environmental training to ensure staff appreciate the importance of improving the eco-friendly status of your service.

Easy ways to ensure staff buy-in include involving them in early discussions about proposed changes and conducting brainstorming sessions with them to seek their input and ideas. Staff may well have opinions about areas which need improvement and the effectiveness of changes already introduced so it's helpful to canvass their opinion regularly.

Consider appointing someone as the environmental coordinator or liaison to take responsibility for ensuring the promotion and maintenance of environmental initiatives in the medium to long term.

Review
You'll need to conduct regular reviews on the effectiveness of any new environmental initiatives you introduce. Consider how well the children, staff and families have adapted to any changes, assess your energy and water usage to determine whether there have been reductions in the medium to long term. Staff and customer questionnaires could be a useful way of determining how people feel about the changes. Make sure you celebrate small milestones, such as the harvest of the first tomatoes from the new garden or the installation of a rain water tank or solar paneling.

Remember every little bit counts!

Further reading:
Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection Guidelines on Eco-Efficiency in Child Care Centres and Kindergartens

NCAC Going Green in Child Care Centres