Have you looked at the food waste that is left over on your kai table after each meal time and thought about where it goes?

According to 'Love Food, Hate Waste' we throw away 157,398 tonnes of food a year in New Zealand. 

However, not all of that wasted food has to go to landfill. You can easily reduce or eliminate it by finding ways some way to compost it. That could be by putting it in local council greenwaste bins (if you are in an area that provides these), or even better set up a composing system with the tamariki in your centre.

We all know that we need encourage children to get outdoors and into the natural world to benefit their health and well-being. As we are born with an innate connection to nature, it makes sense that time in nature calms us and makes us feel good. However, experiences in nature also offer lots of learning opportunities for young children, as it gives them instant responses through all of their senses as they touch, taste, smell, see and hear what is going on around them. Furthermore, such connections tend to foster an ethic of care for the natural environment and the life systems within it, ensuring the future well-being of the planet.

I am a fan of early childhood centres making their own compost. What better way to cut down on your waste and carbon footprint, than composting your food and garden waste?

And even better, children learn the cycle of nutrients that comes from the decomposition of waste to release goodness back into the soil.

Every plant that grows in our garden sucks nutrients out of the soil. Overtime the soil becomes depleted of nutrients if we don’t feed it, and our plants won’t grow strong and healthy. Compost helps to replenish the nutrient levels in the soil.

Often when we hear the word sustainability we think ‘caring for the environment’, reduce, reuse, recycle, gardening etc. However, education for sustainability is more than just looking after the environment. It includes three pillars as set out by the United Nations in 1992 – the Social pillar (includes social and cultural apsects), the Environmental pillar and the Economic pillar (includes political ideologies). These three pillars combine together to become sustainability. Education for sustainability is teaching how these three pillars interact and combine to “to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, chap 2, para.1).

Gardening provides a model for keeping the pillars of sustainability balanced.