Warren Road Sustainability – Led by Mrs Jeremy
Warren Road School has been an Eco Ambassador School for 4 years now. All children and staff work enthusiastically to extend sustainable activities through the ’8 doorways’ as recommended by the National Framework.
Our work is led by a very active Eco Team, each class having at least one Eco representative, although many members bring along their friends to help. We have a yearly action plan and meet once a week to discuss and carry out planned tasks such as:
- Planting, taking care of and harvesting our own fruit and vegetables.
- Providing habitats for animals and plants in our Nature Area and around the school grounds.
- Working with local schools to promote a sustainable lifestyle at home and at school.
- Linking up with schools in other countries to share projects and learn about different cultures.
- Planning whole school events such as World Water Day and Switch off Fortnight.
- Helping to promote sustainable travel – our 2 Junior Travel Ambassadors speak in assemblies and hold competitions.
- Monitoring our energy and water bills and setting targets to reduce our energy use.
- Recycling paper, plastic, batteries, mobile phones, pens and textiles.
Our Nature Area
We are lucky to have a wild nature area in our grounds. Within our nature area, we have a large variety of wildlife habitats where we can observe the animals and plants that live there.
Recycling of School Materials
As you may realise, our school recycles many materials, all of which goes towards our part in saving our environment. Recycling plastic cups is one of the many things we do at school. As we throw away many cups every week at lunchtime, this is an excellent way of making sure we don’t harm the environment. This idea has been used in school for many years now and is a major success.
At our school, we also recycle paper; not only that but we have made our own new paper out of it, as well. Both of these Eco-friendly ideas are very important. Each class has its own white paper recycling bin and we use them regularly.
Finally, recycling used ink cartridges is another way we help to look after the environment. Children bring in the empty cartridges to school and they are collected and recycled.
This year we are also recycling:
- batteries
- textiles
- used pens
This all helps to reduce the waste which goes into landfill sites – yay!!
Switch off Fortnight
During ‘Switch Off Fortnight”, the whole school participated in saving energy for 2 weeks. The members of the EcoTeam went around at lunchtime every day to check if the lights were off and whiteboards blanked in every empty classroom, library and office.
Classes were awarded red, orange or green Energy Eagles. The results were very close but the winning classes were 2R, 6P and 5T. Class 6J got a special mention for using energy-saving measures at home too. Year 6 pupils posted their pledges to save energy on our Virtual Learning Platform – Fronter.
The ‘Switch off Fortnight turned out to be a huge success and great fun and we are still carrying on with this project now.
Carbon Footprint
One of our environmental projects is to save energy in the school and reduce our ever-increasing gas, electricity and water bills. Each year, our Year 6 pupils, take on the additional role of ‘Carbon Detectives’ and work out how much gas, electricity and water we have used. This data is required to establish our school’s Carbon Footprint.
Every year we set targets to try and reduce our energy use at school. This year we have set ourselves a target to reduce our carbon emissions by 5%. In October, we were very happy to receive an Energy Award Certificate certificate from the DEEC and Eco-Schools, for reducing our school’s carbon footprint by over 10%! However, we still have to work hard to decrease the amount of energy we use and to make sure we buy ‘eco-friendly’ goods for our school.
We hope to raise awareness of how we all contribute to environmental pollution and then take action to help reduce these effects. Watch this space to track our efforts!
