Reducing Waste - Goat Lees Primary School

At Goat Lees Primary, we work extremely hard, as a whole school, to reduce the waste we produce, and we have many ways in which we try to do this.

Our class Water Ambassadors, who collect daily all the unused water from the children’s class reusable water bottles and empty them into our classroom water butts – it is amazing how quickly the water butts are filled, and it just goes to show how much water people waste without realising it. This water is then used to water our many plants around the school throughout the year: classroom plants, raised beds with our wild flowers for our bees and other pollinators, our vegetable gardens outside our school kitchen, our native trees in our micro-wood (which is now 5 years old), and our newly planted hedgerow and Community Orchard.

We also collect all unwanted metal, from drinks cans to old trampolines and dismantled aluminium greenhouses. We take it all to our local metal recycling company (EMR), where we have an account, and get money based on the grade of metal and weight. This money helps fund other outdoor projects and, more importantly, makes sure it is disposed of correctly.

We have our fantastic ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ project that we started a couple of years ago. This was originally set up to give staff and parents a place to pass on unwanted foods and toiletries so that it didn’t go into landfill. This, due to its success, has expanded greatly, and we now have donations of any items that people no longer want (from kitchen items to baby car seats). Many of our children are from low-income families, so we have had countless parents praising this scheme as it has been a lifeline for many.

This is being expanded to have a permanent outdoor ‘Book Cupboard’ (which is currently being built by our wonderful site manager, Jon Pearce), where we will display used books for parents to take at the end of the school day.

We have also recently changed the school’s recycling waste collection company; although we encourage our children not to waste paper, there is always waste paper to be recycled, and what isn’t used for scrap for the children to draw on or shredded to be used on our compost heaps, is collected for recycling. Our old company, however, was limiting the waste they would take away, so we sourced another company (Trident Waste Management Ltd), which would also take our food waste. This food waste, through anaerobic digestion, is made into biogas, fertiliser, and high-grade soil conditioner, instead of being incinerated. This has been a very positive change and another way that Goat Lees is helping the environment and dealing with waste.

We try extremely hard at Goat Lees to think of as many ways as we possibly can to help our planet, our environment and the people around us, and many of our ideas stem from our pupils, either through lessons in the classroom or from our Environmental Ambassadors.