Newsletter

We have produced a short Eco Club newsletter of recent activities that we will be handing out at St Aidan’s Church (Mearns Road) Eco Fair this Saturday 8th October (12-3). They will have stalls with advice on how to ‘go greener’ (including saving energy to save you money), cookery demonstrations, Fairtrade goods, ’grow your own’, talks and tea/coffee. Children’s attractions include special performances of a musical, bulb planting, games and livestock.
12.30 & 1.45pm Free children’s theatre
1.15pm Living Simply-Simply Living. Young people’s experiences
2.30pm ‘What happens when I dump paint down my drain’

See you there!

Our Eco Code

We have thought long and hard of how to present our Eco Code and what should be in it and what our school should be trying to do. Here is our finalised Eco Code that is going to be presented to each year groups assembly and put up in every class room.

Our School Eco Code

As a School we aim to:

• Keep our School and surrounding community free from litter
• Reduce, Reuse & Recycle our waste eg recycling paper and printer cartridges
• Maintain and improve our School Grounds
• Be mindful of the wildlife and biodiversity surrounding our school
• Save energy

Help us to make St Ninian’s High School more environmentally friendly

PS The poster for classrooms has our logo and pictures on it so it’s a bit more attractive looking! Hopefully!

Plastic bottles bird feeders

Some of the bird feeders that we have made from recycled plastic bottles. They are proving very popular with the surrounding birds and even some squirrels. I suppose they deserve some food too given the snowy weather in December!

Eco Schools Conference

Mr Kerr and members of the Eco Club attended an East Renfrewshire Eco Schools Conference today at Woodfarm High School. It was a very informative event and we have come away with some excellent ideas for the present and for the future. Go Greener Newsletter March 2010

We were shown these videos which are pretty cool and will tie in with our Energy topic nicely. We might use them to show to whole school assemblies.

News just in – St Ninian’s awarded Eco Schools Silver Award

We have just been informed that we have been awarded the Eco Schools Silver Award.

Well done to all those pupils involved with the Eco Club for their hard work this year. It has really paid off.

We can start working towards the Green Flag which we can hopefully get next year.

The environmental cost of googling?

Our school resource librarian has drawn my attention to this interesting article reported on the BBC website. An academic from Harvard University in the States has claimed that just two searches on Google produces a similar volume of Carbon Dioxide emissions as boiling a kettle.

Google have denied these claims and said that the figures are far too high. They have also stated their green intentions. A spokesman for them said “In 2007, we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 and so reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That’s a lot of kettles.”

It is an interesting article, well worth a read.

RECYCOOL APPEAL LAUNCHED

The Eco Club has launched its Recycool Appeal and is asking pupils, staff, parents and local businesses to bring in their old mobile phones and empty printer cartridges. This will help raise money for the school and also for charity.

Mobile phones and printer cartridges contain toxic substances, which, if they are dumped in landfill, can leak into the surrounding soil and pollute the earth. As well as preventing pollution, recycling old mobiles can help developing countries. many developing nations do not have a comprehensive landline infrastructure. As a result, mobile phones may be the only way of communicating over a distance. Recycool send old mobiles to these countries to help improve their communication.

You can support our Recycool Appeal by donating your own empty printer cartridges, old mobile phones and PDAs. There are collecting boxes for these items in the entrance area to the School.

We have set some pretty big targets so if you have an old mobile sitting in a drawer then please bring it in.

Members of the Eco Club with Mr Kerr at the launch of the appeal.

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Litter survey

The Eco-Club is trying to find out local community views on litter. An online survey has been developed. We would be grateful if you could spend two minutes to complete the short survey.
Click Here to take survey

Litter – Winners of the anti-litter poster competition

The S1-S3 anti-litter poster competition has now closed and the Eco-Club has judged all of the entries. The standard was very high with some terrific artistic efforts and good ideas about preventing litter. The three winners are Sian Kelly, Ciara Lawwell and John Kinney. Congratulations to them. They will receive their prizes in the next assembly. Their great posters will be displayed around the school. You can see them here.

St Ninian’s Wordle

Found a link to Wordle on Mr O’D's blog. It creates a word cloud of key words. Here is one created from the Eco Club news that will appear in the next School newsletter. It looks cool!

© 2008 Jonathan Feinberg subscribe