Year 9 pupils reducing Poltair’s carbon footprint

Over the past few months, Luke Martin, a Science Teacher here at Poltair, has been doing a lot of work with our students to reduce our Carbon Footprint and to make our school more sustainable.

As part of this work, we ran an energy and environment enterprise day with Energy and Waste expert guests from Cornwall County Council and sustainability expert Dick Strawbridge from BBC2's 'It's not easy being green'.. On that day, a number of Year 9 student-led projects bid for (and received) funding to actively reduce our carbon footprint in school and are now getting underway. Projects include such things as trialling small-scale electricity microgeneration (using solar and wind); establishing infrastructures and policies for recycling (paper, cans and other materials); reducing our electricity and mains water consumption; re-establishing a vegetable garden and planting new trees (from locally collected seeds) within the school grounds and creating a wildlife pond.

One of our particularly innovative projects involves the design and creation of a basketball bin system for encouraging our students to get involved in responsibly managing and even recycling their waste. Put simply, the bin systems will give students the opportunity to 'shoot' their litter, cans and other recyclable materials into basketball-type hoops mounted on fixed cabinets over collecting bins. The hoop chute will have a sensor in it that activates an output (such as an audible message and/or flashing lights) if the waste 'scores'. The power for this output will come from renewable generation methods. The students working on this project will source their materials from our local Household Waste Recycling Centre and Cornwall Scrapstore - which aims to stop reusable resources going into landfill.

We look forward to seeing some of these initiatives starting to take shape in the coming months and to the difference they will make to the Poltair environment.