Sustainability

Welcome to Challenge 1: Let’s do lunch.

It’s a disposable world

We live in a throw-away society. Most of the things we buy come wrapped in large amounts of packaging which we simply dispose of. When things break it is often easier to put them in the bin and buy them new than it is to have them repaired. There are growing numbers of products, such as disposable cameras and nappies, which are deliberately meant to be used just once and then discarded.

The three R’s - Reduce, Re-use, Recycle

The amount of rubbish we create is starting to have a huge impact on the global environment:

• Disposing of materials which have been made from non-renewable resources means that we will run out of those resources much sooner than if we recycled and re-used what we have.
• Throwing away manufactured materials such as plastics can have serious environmental consequences. Plastics can take hundreds or even thousands of years to break down in landfill sites. Many of the plastics we use can be recycled rather than thrown away.
• Metals such as aluminium and steel can be recycled indefinitely. The financial and environmental cost of recycling is much less than producing these metals from raw materials.
• About a fifth of all the material we throw away is packaging. Manufacturers can reduce the amount of packaging they use and consumers can re-use items such as plastic bags, jam jars etc.

In this section the activities are based around making our lives more sustainable through looking at how we can reduce the amount of waste and rubbish we create.

To take part, just download the Let's Do Lunch Activity Sheet and follow the instructions.

Access the activity sheets, lesson plans and quiz for Challenge 1: Let's do lunch by following the links below.

• Challenge 1 Let’s do Lunch - Activity Sheets.
• Challenge 1 Let’s do Lunch - Quiz.
• Challenge 1 Let’s do Lunch - Lesson Plans PDF
• Challenge 1 Let’s do Lunch - Curriculum focus PDF

Related links

• Help with PDFs