Green School News

The adjudication date for our next green flag is drawing near and the green school committee is working very hard. The number of plastic bottles among pupils and staff has been reducing steadily. Thank you to Anna Theunissen for designing a lovely certificate to award to the classes with the least number of plastic bottles every month. The certificates are displayed proudly in the recipient classrooms. We have also replaced the plastic cups we give to girls who forgot their drinks with reusable beakers. Pupils and teachers have been sharing very interesting information about plastic which is then brought to our meetings before being communicated to the school community every Friday over the intercom by our committee members. All the classes prepared wonderful projects on the theme of plastic such as the durability of plastic, the harm it presents for ocean creatures, the amount of resources that are used to produce and recycle plastic as well as ideas on how plastic can be reused. Videos and photographs about the projects were placed on the school server for all the classes to enjoy. The committee organised a competition to design a symbol to go on all plastic packaging which would signal clearly if that packaging could go in the green bin or not. The response to the competition was great and the committee chose a design by Faye McCloskey in Ms. Gorman’s fourth class as the winner. You can see her design below. A copy of the design was sent to our local TDs with a letter explaining our work this year. We asked the TDs to consider replacing all the confusing symbols that appear on our packaging with Faye’s easier to understand design. We also suggested that a national campaign is needed about plastic which would focus on the importance of reducing our use of it and how to recycle it.  We further recommended that all waste companies should have the same recycling rules. The committee also chose ten posters on the theme of water to represent our school in a Green Schools Irish Water competition. We were also delighted to link up with the Cabinteely Tidy Towns committee. Ms. McCarthy’s fourth class participated in a litter pick up with the committee and we look forward to more joint endeavours. Our infant classes learned lots of information about litter and waste from a talk given by the Ballymun Rediscovery Centre and we are very grateful to Fiona Fullam who gave a very interesting talk to our sixth classes about the dangers of ocean plastic. Finally we completed another global citizenship awareness survey and we will communicate the results here shortly.

Winning design by Faye:

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