Two years ago, St. Albert’s Primary signed up to take part in a rewilding programme in the Scottish Highlands with Trees for Life. The vision of this organisation is of a revitalised wild forest in the Highlands of Scotland, providing space for wildlife to flourish and communities to thrive. For a small fee, Trees for life will plant native species of trees on your behalf. Over time, this will transform bare hillsides, helping to restore the Caledonian forest, thus providing a rich habitat for Scottish wildlife such as red squirrel, black grouse, pine martens and golden eagles. We continue to add trees to this grove as part of our Climate Action Eco topic as planting native species supports local biodiversity and trees help to remove carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere, thus fighting global warming.

The ‘St. Albert’s Primary’ grove now has 19 trees planted in it and we hope that this will increase year on year with kind donations from parents and staff. If you wish to plant a tree in our school’s grove, go to:

https://treesforlife.org.uk/find-a-grove/

and type St. Albert’s Primary into the search box. There you can choose to add to our grove and even dedicate your trees to someone special.

This year we had a visit from local  author Lindsay Littleson, who had written a children’s book around the theme of rewilding. Our Eco Committee members met her at a special assembly, where she spoke about her journey to becoming an author and the importance of being resilient through all the challenges of life. She was very interested to find out  about our involvement with the Trees for Life rewilding scheme from our two senior Eco Committee members, Kasim Ahmed and Shadi Salha.

As part of our work on the Litter and Waste Eco School’s topic, our pupils have been busy since August 2021 trying to cut the amount of litter in our grounds and in our two adopted streets, Maxwell Drive and St. Andrew’s Drive. You can see some of our photos below of our litter picking in the local area and in our school grounds.

As well as picking up the litter,  we run surveys to see what types of litter there are. This has helped us to see what we need to do to tackle this. As ever, we get the strangest of items turning up in our litter surveys. In previous years, we found diver’s flippers, six inch lime green stiletto shoes and half a bike. In our latest litter picks, metal forks, hub caps and pots and pans turned up.

P5 on a litter survey in our school grounds

Litter Survey in our adopted streets. Look how clean we left St. Andrew’s Drive. Not one piece of litter in sight!

Here is the summary of all the entries on our survey team’s sheets. As you can see the sweet wrappers are the biggest part of the litter problem in our school grounds.

Crisp packets and sweet wrappers are always the worst offenders in our school grounds and plastic bottles also used to be one of the biggest contributors to our litter problem, until the council stopped providing bottled water in the dinner hall. The Eco Committee have discussed these issues at their meetings and they decided that we would start recycling our crisp packets with Terra cycle initially. This was a scheme whereby you could collect and return crisp packets and they would be made into insulation blankets for homeless people. Unfortunately, this scheme ended and now we take our crisp packets to Tesco for recycling.

Here is Kasim with our bags of weighed crisp packets, ready to go to Tesco to be recycled.

The Eco Committee has proposed that pupils unwrap their sweets or snacks at home and put them into their lunchboxes, to be eaten straight from there at play times, as a way to stop the sweet wrappers ending up scattered across the playgrounds. We hope to introduce this idea in the new year as well as provide parents with a leaflet on how to make pupil’s packed lunches more sustainable. The leaflet will be based on the research that P4-7 pupils have been tasked with, for our Waste-Free Packed Lunch Competition. Pupils should undertake some research at home and make  a poster with a labelled diagram of what a waste free lunch should be, in terms of packaging and food. The deadline for com petition entries has been extended to the first week back after the holidays and winners will be announced at our Walking Bus Assembly in the new year.

Another way to stop waste going to landfill sites is to have a Book and Toy swap Day and this is exactly what we did. Pupils brought along their old, unwanted toys or books to our event and had the chance to see what was on offer. They had to agree to swap their items for something they wanted. There were lots of happy faces at the end of the event as pupils went home with something they wanted.

Switch Off Fortnight Success

The Eco Committee used the calculator on The Pod’s  website to calculate our carbon savings over Switch Off Fortnight and we found that by turning off lights  and by switching off other electrical items when they didn’t need to be on, we saved 129 kg of CO2 from entering the earth’s atmosphere. We are proud of this achievement. We also saved 504 kWh s of electricity and 385 m 3 of gas. We worked out that if we keep up with our energy saving efforts for the rest of the school year, we could save  1393 kg of CO2.

Active Travel Grant Award Success

We found out last week that we have been awarded an Active Travel/ Outdoor Learning  grant of £2700 to buy the high visibility clothing for the adults and children who will be taking part in our walking bus scheme in the new year. We are delighted to have been so lucky and this money will come in very useful to help get our walking bus going and reduce the numbers of cars in the morning and at 3 p.m. each day and so reduce our school’s carbon footprint.

Fighting Climate Change by Composting

Last Week P 4-7 attended a Composting assembly in the school Hall, run by the Eco Committee. As we make our own compost in our Eco garden at St. Albert’s to use in growing fruit and vegetables, we wanted all our pupils to be aware of what composting is and why we should do it. Pupils watched a presentation about this subject and were reminded about the different bins we used for collecting and recycling food waste, crisp packets and plastic bottles, so they dispose of these items in the correct bins. At the end of the presentation, pupils took part in  a quiz to earn points for their house groups, Earth, Wind or Fire.  The Eco Committee added these points to their monthly totals. The pupils learned that if food waste isn’t composted and is sent to a landfill site, where it is dumped by the bin men, it releases greenhouse gases to the atmosphere such as  Methane, which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at contributing to global warming. They also learned that food scraps contain a lot of water and when combined with all the other rubbish in landfill sites, to create a toxic sludge. This sludge leaches into the soil and can get into groundwater and from there into rivers and lakes, harming the creatures that live there. They learned that the  types of items that we want pupils  to add to our compost bins are as follows:

WHAT CAN GO IN OUR COMPOST BINS

1. All fruit except citrus fruits like lemons, oranges, tangerines, limes and grapefruits.
2. Twigs and sticks.
3. Shredded or torn up paper.
4. Grass cuttings (if you haven’t used weedkiller on the grass)
5. Newspaper
6. Corrugated cardboard boxes.
7. Shredded toilet paper rolls
8. Old cotton towels and sheets cut up
9. Dead leaves
10. Egg shells and egg cartons
11. Brown paper shopping bags

The pupils were told that they can bring in some of these items to add to our three part composter in the Eco garden and in return, they will earn house points.