Becoming a Plastic Free School

Introduction  

Due to the constantly changing climate, our school has decided to sign up to be a plastic-free school. This may seem impossible, but every day we are finding ways to battle single-use plastic in our school, such as crisp packets, water bottles and sandwich wrappers used to cover our sandwiches in the school dinner hall. We are encouraging children, if not the whole schools, to recycle what they can and take part in the fight against climate change. We have signed up to become a “Plastic Free School” with Surfers Against Sewage to try to reduce and recycle as much single use plastic as we can.

How we can become a Plastic Free School?

We need to achieve 5 of the following goals:

1)  Action plan – We need to create an action plan on what we’re going to do.

2) Trash mob – In January we’re going to have a week where classes are responsible for collecting the rubbish that is left in the playground and around the cricket pitch.

3) Challenging government – We’re going to write to our MSP, telling them about our ideas and asking for their support.

4) Challenging industry – After collecting the rubbish from our litter pick, we’re going to sort it and identify the main companies that create the products that make up the majority of the rubbish.

5) Commit to getting rid of 3 problematic pieces of plastic – single use

What we have done so far?

We identified that the dinnerhall and packed lunches were big contributors to the issue of singe use plactic within the school. We have had a discussion with Cathy – one of the catering staff, on how we can cut down on single use plastic and came up with some ideas to help us get there. We paired up in class and designed a poster for each bin we plan on using for recycling. The items we are recycling are; soft plastic off of our sandwich wrappers, grape tubs / yoghurt pots, plastic water bottles provided to us in school and crisp packets, along with some creating some videos on how to recycle each of them.

We also created videos to show the other pupils in the school how to use these bins. Please have a look at them.

 

Written by:

Jess, Charlie, Kepa, Miko, Arlo, Olivia, Jack & Arwen