St Ignatius Jesuit Community Riverview, NSW

St Ignatius Church is part of the St Ignatius College Riverview. Together, the church and the school have endeavoured to become more ecologically friendly.

In 2008 we installed a smart metering system, to be used for resource management and teaching. We also installed solar panels in 2010 and placed three minute timers on the showers in the boarding house. Weekly staff emails on energy use were used and an Environment Statement was developed for the church. The vision of the statement is “To form our Community to be educated and active participants in moving society towards sustaining God’s creation”.

Riverview is committed to the responsible management of our resources; energy, water, waste and biodiversity. All members of the Riverview community should learn to appreciate and take responsibility for the management of our resources. Our decisions make an impact, our purchases, how we travel to school. We can make a difference, and you can to; here’s how:

Energy – we expect the Riverview community to…. switch it off and turn it down

Monitoring of energy usage is undertaken daily through the EcoDriver system installed within the school.  The target is for energy use to trend down each year.

Water– we expect the Riverview community to …..minimise use

Monitoring of water use is undertaken by the Streamwatch group within the school. The target for water resource management is to not waste water.

Waste – we expect the Riverview community to …..reduce reuse recycle

Monitoring of recycling is undertaken by the Senior Environment group who have charge of the Red Bin recycling system throughout the school.

Biodiversity – we expect the Riverview community to ……tread gently

Riverview is blessed with natural and built assets, which need to be protected.

We have established three student groups who take home messages about water, waste, energy, biodiversity – these groups produce podcasts and this year our Earth hour podcast was placed on the Earth hour You Tube channel and had around 700 hits, a great outreach.

The church has also hosted sustainability workshops for Lane Cove Council.

This year our annual Earth Hour breakfast held March 16^th 2010 in our hall had over 170 participants from twenty two schools across Sydney. It is a wonderful event to link, learn and share together. The environment leaders run the event, this year our guest speaker was Nick Mueller from AYCC. The flyer for the breakfast is below. We were fortunate to have a media story in Jesuits Communications and the Independent Education Union we hope this will grow the event for next year.

`The new library used sustainable building principles in material selection and design to minimize energy use. The use of air conditioning in the library is minimized, louvers enhance cross ventilation.’