We have been thinking recently about new ways to tackle our litter at St. Albert’s  Primary. We undertake regular litter picking activities in our school grounds and in two streets we have adopted to the front and back of our school to try and tackle both the litter that is dropped in our playground and the litter that blows in from the streets, but our grounds are still not entirely litter free.

We have decided that we need to tackle our litter problem at the source and that means we need to make sure that we are not producing litter in the first place. The way forward with this is to make sure that we are not taking sweet wrappers out into the playground, so when pupils return to school after lockdown, we have decided to implement some new ideas. We need our  pupils who bring a packed lunch to bring a waste free lunch to school. This week, pupils have been asked to research some information about how you can make a packed lunch waste- free as part of their home learning so they understand what that is and why it is better for the environment. We will be asking parents to ensure that packed lunches will be waste free from now on.

We have also signed up to a crisp packet recycling scheme with Teracycle, a great company that can reuse crisp packets to make other new items, such as blankets for homeless people. We will be asking pupils to bring their crisp packets in at the end of playtime and put them in a bag in class. These bags will be collected at the end of every week and emptied into a collection box in the school hall. Every few months we can take the crisp packets to a local collection point where they will be uplifted and taken away to be processed.

We want to ensure that sweet wrappers, which are always a large part of the litter in our grounds, are not taken into the playground either and one idea we have  is to ask parents to take play pieces out of the wrappers and put the play pieces into  the children’s lunch boxes where they can be stored till playtimes, perhaps wrapped in something more environmentally friendly than plastic. As we go forward with these plans, we will monitor what changes that makes to the litter in our grounds through litter surveys.