This article is from page 26 of the 2008-03-04 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 26 JPG
A PRIMARY school in Shannon has reduced its litter by a massive 80 per cent, as part of an environmentally- friendly initiative which has been undertaken over the past year.
St Aidan’s school is preparing for its very first application for a green flag and these plans are currently reaching their final stages.
Under the initiative, which is run by An Taisce, schools can apply for green flags every two years. The scheme is a reflection of a school’s efforts towards keeping the environ- ment clean.
A new composter has been pur- chased for St Aidan’s, while packag-
ing has also been reduced over the past year.
“We have cut down on packaging on lunches and the children take all their rubbish home in their lunch boxes,” said co-ordinator Brenda OE Te co
The school has put an end to the use of paper towels and the students bring in face cloths instead.
“We have cut down the litter that goes to the landfill by 80 per cent and we have also cut down on recy- cling by 80 per cent in the past year,” added Ms Clarke.
“We used to have 16 to 18 refuse sacks and two huge bins and now we have just two sacks,” she added.
As part of the school’s initiative,
an environmentally-friendly day was organised last Friday, February 29.
According to Ms Clarke, the school adopted the theme ‘Extra Day, Extra Green’, for Friday, which was the ex- tra day for the leap year.
“All the children were encouraged to bring in their lunches in reusable containers and the only snacks were fruit,” she said.
“We are trying to make the chil- dren aware of the amount of lit- ter that is caused by packaging and more aware of the use of paper in the school,’ she added.
An added incentive is a fun compe- tition run by the teachers every week. The children with the least amount of packaging get prizes at the end of
the week!
So why is the school now applying for the green flag, for the first time?
“We had looked at it for the past few years, because we were recycling pa- per and cardboard. It had been in the backs of our minds for a while, but needed the support of everybody in the school,’ she said.
The full backing has been given by the 14 teachers and 280 students and hopes are high that the flag can now rom-lesbeA (ore b