To update you on our Oxfam Porty Project, our shiny smartbins arrived in school in April and were installed in the foyer. The whole school was informed by assembly and school bulletin of the Eco team’s visit to Edinburgh University, where they helped to put the smartbins togather using scales, sensors and lights, circuit boards and some complex cables! This was a great experience as it gave our pupils some ownership over the smartbins. We rose to the challenge of filling each house’s smartbin with donated clothing 4 times before the Easter holidays to win a dress down day for each house. Crichton and Duddingston both reached the target of 4, Abercorn reached 5 and Brunstane filled an impressive 6 bins! Pupils who donated the most were rewarded with Amazon vouchers, as an extra incentive.

These clothes have been sent to a grateful Oxfam shop for sale, the proceeds going towards various projects to improve the standard of living and reduce inequalities worldwide.

What next? Well, we plan to track 4 of the items with GPS instruments, to fill in the gap in our knowledge between donating to Oxfam and the money raised going to the projects we can read about.

The project has been so successful that we’d like to make it an annual event at Portobello High School, allowing us to take action for waste minimisation and help a charity make the world a better place at the same time. This teaches us a valuable lesson about our role as citizens, and of course adds to our inter-house competition!