Padbury School - Eco Flag and Recycling Champions!

At the beginning of the summer half term Greener Padbury Group joined forces with Padbury C of E School’s Eco Council to challenge our village to recycle as much plastic waste as we could under Terracycle’s Office Supplies Zero Waste box scheme.  We're happy to report that the children and villagers rose to the challenge brilliantly and have diverted 13.5kg of waste from landfill.  This was largely made up of pens, glue sticks and plastic wallets.  This waste has now been sent back to Terracycle and will be sorted into different categories which can then be used to make new items such as garden furniture and watering cans.

GPG would like to thank the school for embracing the challenge and offer a particular ‘well done’ to Sycamore class who collected the bulk of the items – a reward will be coming your way! 

And the school is doing so much more than embracing recycling: they have recently been awarded the Green Flag - with Distinction! We asked their Eco Council to tell us more about this. Thank you to Iona, a year 6 councillor, for the report below.

"The Eco Flag is an Eco-Schools award which shows that we have achieved each of our topics and are working towards becoming a more Eco school.

For the Green Flag we had to choose three topics;

• ·       Marine

• ·       Litter

• ·       Biodiversity

With Marine we held an Earth Day. We had an assembly that told us how litter is affecting the planet and us as humans. Then each class made things to add to a display.

For Litter we signed up to the Buckinghamshire Reduce Single Use Plastic Scheme and we earned the Gold Award for using less plastic. We’ve done lots of litter picks in school and in the community. We have been collecting pens, empty glue sticks, plastic wallets and more to send off to be recycled.

For Biodiversity we increased the biodiversity of our school by building a wormery, bug hotel and planting wild flowers for bees."

Huge congratulations to everyone involved. The panel also praised the school's efforts to make their grounds more wildlife friendly with wild spaces, bug hotels and a wormery, and how they enjoy and connect with their local green spaces through forest school, learning about sustainability and biodiversity.

We are very proud to have been able to support the school achieve this and look forward to working together on more green initiatives.