Sustainable School

We feel our school and our community has the potential to be a lot greener and a lot more sustainable. The recycling needs to be greatly improved and we would also like to help improve our local community.

Our Social Issue

A sustainable world is one where people are empowered to make the best decisions for them, their community and the planet. We would like to focus on issues like clean air, good recycling practices, safe cycling and promoting a greener and cleaner environment.

Why We Chose It

While we were trying to come up with an idea at the start of the year we went litter picking in a park beside our school. When we finished we noticed that there were loads of plastic bottles in the bags we collected. One of the class said how it was a terrible waste of money. This simple statement gave us our idea. I’d other people don’t want the money we will take it.

Our Goal

We have two main goals. 1: try raise €1000 for charity. 2: have fun. We have two activities to raise money and promote fun. 1: Christmas film festival where we charge 1st years €2 for a ticket and sell sweets at a shop we set up. This would promote fun because we all dressed up, sang Christmas songs, played games and watched some festive films. 2: bottles for barretstown: As part of our campaign (explained in other section) we are having an awareness event with games and competitions: Games/competition include: Bottle flip Bottle basketball Guess the bottles in the bag

Our Innovative Action

Our main aims were to raise money for charity, improve recycling and promote fun in our school. Raising money for charity: We held a Christmas film festival for 1st years. In total that raised €600. This money was split evenly between Old Bawn Christmas Hamper Appeal and sponsoring Trees in Barretstown’s Magic Forest. We then set up a bottle and can recycling campaign “Bottles for Barretstown”. We designed, created and painted a new purpose built bin and ran a campaign to get students to donate their cans and bottles which we use to collect the money for charity

Our Impact

We have raised over €900 for charity and created a lot of awareness about our issues in our school. Our campaign has made a big difference to the sustainability in our school by improving recycling but also our local community through activities like litter picking. We have also partnered with barretstown children’s charity which has supported a number of people in our school.