Last week, Class 3 took part in some litter picking activities in the upper school playground. They did a really good job of finding litter and enjoyed removing it. It is important to keep our school grounds litter free as litter, especially of the plastic variety, which can take anywhere from 20 to 500 years to decompose in the environment. It can also be washed down drains and enter rivers where it can kill wildlife and enter the food chain. Here are some pictures of Class 3 in action.
This week, some of the older members of our Eco Committee will be carrying out surveys to find out how sustainable our pupil’s packed lunches are in terms of packaging of foodstuffs. We hope to reveal the results in a future blog and produce a leaflet for parents on this, in the hope that we can reduce packaging that is contributing to the litter in the playground. When we have tried out our new ideas to tackle waste at its source and evaluated their success, we can formulate a waste policy for our school, to help tackle these problems in the future.
Tomorrow afternoon, the Eco Committee will be giving a presentation for pupils at our weekly assembly about our school’s forthcoming walking bus. We are working with members of the parent council and Lorna Young from D.R.S to get our walking bus up and running as soon as possible. This assembly presentation will demonstrate to pupils what a walking bus is and why it is a good way to travel to and from school, for the health and well being of our pupils and for the good of the environment. We hope that lots of pupils will want to sign up and join our walking bus when it starts.
In other news, the blue bin recycling services to our school have resumed and we are delighted. The Eco Committee can now continue collecting classroom waste paper and card and they will ensure that it goes into our new blue recycling bin that has been delivered to replace our last one that was broken. We still hope to receive an extra blue bin that has been requested, as two are needed for a school that recycles as much as we do. We hope to raise enough money through our Rag Bag recycling to replace our blue bags with pop-up bins for classrooms that are easy to carry and keep their shape.
The Great British Spring Clean (Keep Britain Tidy’s annual national clean-up campaign) runs from 17 March – 2 April this year and as ever St. Albert’s Primary will be involved. We will be taking part in the week beginning the 17th April and will be cleaning up the streets of Pollokshields. The litter problem has worsened lately in the local area and we hope to make a difference. At least two classes have agreed to take part and survey the litter and graffiti (which is a form of litter) in our area. The pupils will examine the results of this survey to see which are the most common forms of litter in Pollokshields and discuss what we can do about it. We hope that this will be a week when parents and other members of the local community will join in to help clean up our streets.
