Caravan Park rallies Loch Sport locals for container collection

Loch Sport Caravan Park has rallied its local community to collect containers and help raise funds for Loch Sport Primary school and other good causes.

When they heard that Victoria’s Container Deposit Scheme was about to get underway in 2023, Belinda and her husband, Ray, thought, “let’s see what we can do”.

Belinda and Ray own Loch Sport Caravan Park. Their granddaughter goes to Loch Sport Primary School, where Ray is also school president. They decided to collect and return containers from the caravan park to help raise funds for the school.

Belinda and Ray were planning to fundraise through the caravan park when the Loch Sport Foreshore Committee offered to loan them a cage trailer. And that was when their fundraising efforts started to take off.

Loch Sport has a Facebook community noticeboard, so Belinda posted a picture of the trailer and invited the community to put their containers in and help raise funds for the primary school. And that’s exactly what the people of Loch Sport did. According to Belinda, it became “bigger than Ben Hur in a minute!”

That was just before Christmas. By the time school holidays were over in February 2024, Belinda, Ray and the Loch Sport community were able to donate $3,600 to the primary school. By April, that amount had risen to more than $4,840.

Based on the success of their fundraising activity through CDS Vic, Belinda and Ray decided to expand their support to other good causes in their community, including Loch Sport Community Care and Our Haven Wildlife Shelter, among others. To help everyone stay motivated to continue donating their containers, the Caravan Park regularly posts a picture of the trailer on the community noticeboard with an update on fundraising progress.

Belinda’s advice for organisations considering using CDS Vic for fundraising is, “go for it if you’ve got the capacity to do it. The only thing you’ll need to arrange is somewhere to store your containers while you’re collecting them”.

At last count, the total funds raised and donated by Belinda, Ray and the Loch Sport community had risen to more than $7,000! That’s over 70,000 drink containers that will not make their way into landfill or waterways and can now be transformed into all kinds of new products.

Congratulations, team! That’s a big win for Loch Sport community and a win for the environment too.     

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