Dear Parents/Carers,

Summer is finally here. What better time to have a wardrobe clear out and make way for your new summer wardrobe.

Did you know that at St. Albert’s Primary we collect old clothes for recycling and this brings in much needed funds for our Eco Committee to use, for carrying out a variety of environmental activities that help us to earn our prestigious green flag awards from Eco Schools Scotland?

We have a Green outdoor collection bank situated just inside the gates at the infant playground where you can drop off bags of unwanted clothes, paired shoes, handbags or belts.

These are collected when the bin is full and taken to be sorted and graded at the U.K’s largest recycling facility. Good quality clothing is taken to Africa and other countries to be reused by people who need them. Low grade textiles can be made into carpets, underlay, mattress linings and industrial wiping cloths. Nothing is wasted or sent to landfill sites, so it helps to preserve the environment.

In return for these clothing donations the Eco Committee will receive cheques for our funds. Recently we donated £40 from our Eco fund to Solar Aid. This is a charity that is helping to provide solar lights to people in developing countries who have no electricity. These replace dangerous kerosene lamps that they use to light their homes in the evenings. This is a safe, cheap way to provide lighting to poor families across the globe and is especially helpful to young people who are trying to improve their life chances with studying in the evenings.

Will you please help our Eco Committee to continue with their plans? Please donate any unwanted clothes, bags, belts or paired shoes to our clothes bank whenever you can. Thank you.

St. Albert’s Eco Committee

The Eco Committee were invited to work on a project with Rags to Riches who are based at Govanhill Baths. We met with some very special artists who use unwanted items that people throw away to create wonderful pieces of art. The Eco Committee were set a task to come up with ideas for the design of a play structure which would be sited in the infant playground. They wanted it to be on a Water theme as this was one of the three Eco Schools topics we were working on and they wanted it to show pollution of our oceans with plastic, but also use plastic to prevent it from going to landfill sites or ending up going down drains in the street and ending up in our already polluted seas.

They met with the artists and experimented with some different junk items such as cardboard, pipes, pieces of plastic or bottle tops and noted down their ideas. Everything that would be used to create the structure was going to be recycled. In the photos below, you can see them working on their ideas and the finished article.  The structure has proved to be big hit with our infant pupils who climb all over it every day. It also reminds everyone who sees it about the plight of sea creatures because of plastic pollution.

Our school holds a Turner Prize competition every year. This is a chance for pupils to be inspired by issues they have become aware of and the work of talented artists to produce an installation of their own. Primary 4 chose Water and Plastic pollution as the theme for their art. They turned their classroom into an undersea scene using materials that would have ended up in landfill sites to show discarded fishing nets caught up with rubbish left on beaches like sandals for example and they used plastic bottles to make transparent fish so you could see the plastic rubbish they had eaten inside them. They used plastic bottles and string to make jellyfish. They also produced some Haiku poetry and wordles on the subject of ocean pollution. Here are some pictures of their work.

During our Sustainability topics in term 1 2018-19 the whole school had been learning about a variety of sustainability related issues. We had learned in our Science classes about renewable energy in its different forms and the benefits of Solar energy as a clean energy that does not add to climate change. Energy is one of the three topics we have been working on in our Eco Schools journey. The Eco Committee found out about a charity called Solar Aid. This charity supplies solar lamps to people in developing countries, to replace the dangerous kerosene lamps that are used for light in the evenings.

These solar lamps are particularly useful for young people who would be trying to study in the evenings to improve their life chances.  We decided to make a donation of £40 from our Eco fund to this wonderful charity. This would supply 10 solar lights to those who really need them. You can see some of our Eco Committee members in the picture below with Mrs Connell our office manager holding the cheque which was ready to send. We received a thank you certificate from Solar Aid in the post. You can also see this in the pictures below. We were happy to have been able to make a difference to the lives of these young people and their families.

The Eco Committee wanted to do something about the palm oil issue as part of our work on Sustainability goal 12- Responsible production and consumption. The Iceland advert at Christmas although banned on television was circulated on social media and our pupils saw it there. It made them very sad to see how the little orang- utan in the cartoon had no home left because the rainforest where he lived had been destroyed for palm oil production.

They did some more research online and found that other creatures are affected too like clouded leopards and pygmy elephants. Palm oil is  added to many of the foods we eat. Palm oil plantations, the most important tropical vegetable oil in the global oils and fats industry, is the main driver of deforestation in Borneo. In Indonesia alone, palm oil production expanded from 600,000 hectares in 1985 to over 6 million hectares by 2007. Habitat conversion from natural forests to palm oil plantations has been shown to have a devastating impact on tropical forests, along with plants and animals that depend on them. So they wanted to do something about this.

They decided to write letters to the headquarters of some of the biggest supermarkets in Britain, asking them if they would take the palm oil out of their own brand products.

Below you can see the letter to the ASDA head office that our pupils wrote and the reply we received. ASDA, sadly, was the only supermarket who replied to our letters.

However, we have found out that scientists think that there is no such thing as sustainable palm oil. A study over 15 years of fact finding missions as well as data from satellites, governments, charities and palm oil companies own reports, revealed that plantations that are certified as sustainable have lost more forest cover than those without eco-friendly certification. In fact, sustainability labels according to scientists, have resulted in more plantation expansions which is driving the orang-utan to extinction.

What is needed to make a difference is for more people to demand change in letters and petitions to governments and businesses if we are to prevent extinction of some of the world’s most precious habitats and the creatures that depend on them for survival.

As the Eco Committee have been working on Sustainability Goal 12 -Responsible production and consumption we decided what better way to show we support this that holding a Fair Trade stall during Fair Trade fortnight.

Fairtrade is basically a way of helping farmers in developing countries. It means that producers are paid a fair price for the goods they make or grow. These producers acquire Fair Trade certification if their products match a number of ethical criteria. For example, they must  source water sustainably and reduce water use as much as they can over time,  not use any GMOs (Genetically modified organisms) and minimise the use of potentially hazardous chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Fairtrade also ensures worker’s rights for producers.  Consumers pay a little extra for Fairtrade goods but that money is reinvested in the local community and   is used in local projects and infrastructure such as better sanitation, schools and local medical facilities.

We got in touch with the One World shop in Edinburgh and chose goods such as chocolate bars, pencils made from recycled paper, musical flutes and friendship bracelets which we thought would appeal to our pupils. We set up the stall every day in the dinner hall at lunchtime and we sold all our chocolate within a few days. The good thing about the Fairtrade chocolate is that unlike most supermarket chocolate it is  made without palm oil. Palm oil production is devastating rainforests in Indonesia with the resulting deaths of many creatures whose habitat is being destroyed like Orang-utans. We sold just about everything we ordered and returned what we didn’t sell. Here you can see our stall all set up for business. We also ran a Fair Trade stall in 2018. You can see some photos of this one too.

The Eco Committee wanted everyone to learn about the damage being done to oceans by plastic pollution  and they ran an assembly during Eco Week 2018 about this subject. They announced a poster competition for the whole school about the subject of marine litter. Pupils from P4-7 were given a task to research this subject at home to find out some facts for a poster. The infants had to draw a picture to show what is happening. The Eco Committee judged all the posters and you can see the overall winner in this picture below. Hopefully now pupils will think twice about dropping litter in the streets which could be washed down the drains and out to sea.

Last year we had a visit from a beekeeper which the Eco Committee attended. We were interested in finding out about how bees are cared for and we had lots of questions to ask the beekeeper about his job, the different types of bees and how climate change is affecting bees. We found out about production of honey and how that is done and also about the part bees have to play in pollinating our crops. We learned that with global warming due to the continuing use of fossil fuels we may get bees migrating north from other countries to the south in the future which might cause competition with our native species of bees. We learned that spring flowers are blooming earlier due to global warming and when the bees are born they have less time to pollinate. Here are some pictures from our visit.

Every month our Eco Committee and the janitor record our energy and water use meter readings so that we can monitor if we are being successful in cutting our carbon footprint. We worked out that we have managed to cut our electricity use by 6.7 % and we measured our carbon footprint using this and other data we collected. We have had problems trying to cut our gas use due to electrical faults with the school boiler system. We hope to cut our gas usage further next year.

We took part in Switch Off Fortnight this year where everyone really made a special effort to cut our energy use as much as possible. We started off with a whole school  assembly run by the Eco Committee to let everyone know what Switch Off Fortnight is and what we would be doing.

The Eco Committee also put on a play for the whole school about children in  a classroom who were fed up with all the lights and electrical items being on and the heating turned up full blast and what they did to show their teacher about global warming, and the effects on the environment. In the play, they managed to change their teacher’s ideas and the heating was turned off and electricity use cut. This was to show the school about our own situation and how they can help.  After that more children were aware of what they can do in their classrooms to make a difference.

As part of our Eco journey over the last two years we have been trying to cut our energy use at St. Albert’s Primary. Use of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas is contributing to climate change, which as everyone knows is highly damaging to the future of many species on earth including humans. The future of our planet depends on us getting climate change under control.
Fossil fuels need to be burned to release the energy in them. Burning anything releases Carbon Dioxide. Carbon Dioxide builds up in the atmosphere like a blanket round our planet trapping heat that should normally escape back into space. This is resulting in a warmer climate and more rain. More rain brings more floods which threaten coastlines and the human, animal and plant life that exists there. Scientists now think that the effects of climate change have been underestimated and sea levels could rise by 2m instead of the predicted one metre rise.
Flooding though, is only one consequence of climate change. The hotter regions of our world will face more droughts as the climate warms leading to more starvation and extinction. Weather patterns are being disrupted worldwide.
It has been estimated that by 2100 half of the world’s species could be extinct and that is due to human activity. The bumblebee is in danger due to climate change, as rising world temperatures force them to migrate northwards to survive, but at the same time, spring flowers are in bloom earlier which leaves them less time to feed and pollinate them.
Polar bears are another case and many are already suffering as the ice at the North Pole melts. Polar bears hunt from sea ice and global warming is melting their icy habitat, making it increasingly difficult to travel, hunt and raise their young. The sea ice they depend on melts earlier each spring and forms later each autumn. These are just two examples of the threats to species worldwide.

At St. Albert’s we have been trying to do our bit to cut our carbon footprint. We have appointed light monitors in each class to ensure lights and other electrical goods are turned off around the building unless they are absolutely necessary. We have been monitoring our energy and water use readings these past two years with the help of the janitor. You can see some pictures here of our Eco Committee recording energy and water readings with the janitor.