Eco-Friendly schools: 8 examples

Admins, teachers, parents, and students have to deal with a variety of issues in school and the environment is not always the top priority. But there are ways to change that. To take a step forward and start caring about our planet from our schools. To be inspired, we have provided 8 examples of schools that have made an effort to go green. Some big and some small, but they are all worth a read.

International School Basel: Naked Food Challenge

In 2018-2019 Internation School Basel (ISB) embarked on a journey to embrace more sustainable behaviours. As part of that, ISB is now an Eco-Schools member.
To celebrate Earth Day, all Junior School classes were challenged to reduce their single-use plastic waste and only bring in naked food (food without any single-use packaging) for the entire week.
Each day, every class recorded the number of single-use plastic items they placed in their class recycling bag and shared their data. The following day, the classes with zero single-use plastic waste received a Green Heroes certificate.

Colégio dos Platanos: Water, Sanitation, Hygiene

Environmental education and ecological concern are part of the daily life of Colégio dos Plátanos. Under this theme, students carry out projects, works, presentations, theatres, debates and awareness-raising posters.
As a part of the first #EcoSchoolsStayActive campaign, which encouraged students to create positive, action-based videos under the theme of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) students from Colégio dos Platanos worked together to create this informative and creative video.

Canon Burrows C of E Primary School: Eliminating Single-Use Plastic

Canon Burrows C of E Primary School in Greater Manchester successfully completed the five objectives to eliminate single-use plastic in their school. This is an amazing achievement in itself, but these pupils went above and beyond this by harnessing the varying skills and interests of different age groups at the school, ensuring everyone had their part to play.
Some made calls to school suppliers and spoke to the kitchen manager and site manager. Others got creative and made posters to spread their message. It was truly a collective and innovative effort.

Green School: Hands-on approach

Green School’s homegrown, comprehensive green studies curriculum evolves from ecology to sustainability while connecting learners to their local geographic and cultural context. Using a hands-on approach allows learners to “get their hands dirty” and “get mud between their toes” while reinforcing the essential skills of reading, writing, maths and science.

Austin Independent School District: Grow Food in the School Garden

Austin Independent School District is taking an important leadership role in the school garden movement by partnering with students, community members, teachers and administrators to develop a Garden to Café program that extends the lessons learned in the garden to the school café. Garden to Café is about serving healthy, fresh, garden-grown foods to students through school meal programs.
AISD has strengthened their commitment to sustainable and high-quality food efforts by engaging in white-label food programs and featuring local foods on the school’s menu with locally grown ingredients.

Devon Primary School: Going Plastic-Free

In 2018, Devon school has become England’s first plastic-free school. The key changes that enabled the school to go plastic-free included getting rid of plastic from the school's supply chain and replacing single-use plastic with plastic that can be easily recycled.
The school's catering manager, Keri Lambert, said they had started by replacing individual milk cartons for reception students with larger containers - with milk dispensed and drunk from reusable beakers.

West Valley High School: Recycling and composting

For the past several years, the Ecology Club at WVHS has worked hard to compost leftover food items from students’ lunches. During lunches, a team of staff and students goes around the lunchroom collecting leftover fruits and vegetables from students. They then dump the food into the compost bin outside the school, stirring it every couple of weeks. After the compost has broken down into soil, the Ecology Club sells it as topsoil to local gardeners or donates it.

Tampines Secondary: Reducing Carbon Emission

Tampines Secondary has developed resources that either feature sustainability initiatives or are integrated with green infrastructures, such as solar panels and energy-efficient LED lights to reduce net carbon emissions.
It has also installed energy-saving fans and used heat-reflective paint on the east- and west-facing facade walls so that less energy is needed to cool down the building.
In Tampines Secondary, environmental sustainability concepts are woven into the school curriculum.
For instance, in Secondary 1 science lessons, students learn about what Singapore is doing in the area of renewable energy and how solar energy is harnessed.
In food and consumer education, teachers talk about food waste in Singapore and get students to think about how much food is thrown away and how much carbon footprint it involves.