St Vincent’s eco school

1. St Vincent’s eco school Created by the Eco Committee

2. Introduction • This presentation is a evaluation of last year’s and this year’s events and actions involving eco. We have been working very hard on trying to gain our green flag and become an eco school. We hope you enjoy our presentation.   

3. Our actions to reduce litter • Litteris our main concern. We have made an huge effort on getting rid of all the litter in our school grounds. We have created a litter policy, we have litter monitors and we had a spring clean when room 5 of last year went around the school picking up all the litter and we will do this again and again.

4. We have photographs of before we had the spring clean and after we had finished. Room 5 made a video of what they found. We also displayed the litter at assembly and it had a huge impact on the amount of waste in the yard. We had about 300 pieces of litter a week to only about 70 and progressively going down to only about 20. We also have the litter monitors watch the yard at break and lunch.

5. We have graphs around the school of our litter in a week when primary three monitored how much litter we generated. They then showed litter to assembly after 5 days of monitoring the litter. The litter generated decreased from the 80-90 area to 30-45 pieces of litter a day. We hope to have a pristine yard with no litter on it at all in the future.

6. Energy and Water Consumption • We took part in Switch Off Fortnight and we have recorded our energy usage before and during the event. The graphs are around the school in noticeable places, they show that we were using around 750 k-watts a day and during the fortnight we had reduced the usage down to only 500 k-watts. We were really impressed with the amount of energy we saved.

7. We have water catchers to collect rainwater and use it instead of water from the tap. Unfortunately we cannot get access to our water readings but we have low-flow taps in all of the bathrooms and auto-flushes in the urinals. • Room 9 made a climate change PowerPoint at assembly last year, detailing the affects of greenhouse gasses and what can happen if we ignore climate change.

8. Eco School Events • Last year, primary 6 and 7created our eco code about being an eco-school. At a recent assembly a group of pupils sang the eco code to the rest of the school and we all joined in. • We have an annual event on Halloween called Eco-een, where pupils make costumes out of recycled materials or old clothes to represent reusing our waste. We had the local newspaper and news website to take pictures and interview pupils about the event

9. Eco day is another event that shows our input to becoming an Eco School. We had events like making buntings, an eco quiz, we planted a tree outside the office and we went on a nature trail. The RSPB came in to give an assembly, Room 7 went out into a litter walk around our community

10. Health and Wellbeing • We realise that being healthy involves keeping our environment healthy too. We created a Healthy Tuck Shop selling healthy food at breaks. We also had a PowerPoint presentation at an assembly to raise awareness of health. We have health day each year as well when we participate in healthy activities.

11. Thank you!!!   • Thank you for listening to our presentation, we hope we get our green flag!!! Eco Schools!