Sustainability Week at The Hathershaw College

Last week, The Hathershaw College raised awareness for an incredibly important cause. Staff and students committed themselves to making themselves and the school more environmentally conscious and supportive. This involved a number of activities and efforts throughout the week, culminating in a better understanding of how we can better our community and environment. This was a week of awareness but also of meaningful action and commitment.

Environmental sustainability is the responsibility to conserve natural resources and protect global ecosystems to support health and wellbeing, now and in the future. For many of us, on a day to day basis, sustainability is about recycling, reusing and trying to avoid waste in order to lower our carbon footprint and play a part in protecting the planet from climate change. At Hathershaw we are working hard to try and reduce the college’s carbon footprint within the school building but also extending out to our school community and we are encouraging students, staff and parents to learn more about sustainability and join us on our journey to become carbon net zero by 2030.

What changes are we making at Hathershaw?

We have already made a number of changes to become more sustainable as a college. We have ensured that desktop computers are not switched on unless they are in use by staff or students in order to save energy; we are recycling much more around the building with new recycling bins being installed and encouraging staff and students to recycle as much as possible; we are running assemblies this week on the topic of sustainability and had some climate change assemblies earlier in the academic year; we are auditing our curriculum to ensure we cover the important topics of climate change and sustainability across subjects as stipulated by the DfE and we are always looking for more ways to make ourselves and the school building more sustainable.

Another small change we have made to support sustainability is to replace every toilet roll dispenser with a new Fibrepack dispenser. Fibrepack is basically recycled drinks cartons with the aluminium removed and our supplier makes both the dispenser and toilet roll out of this material. Once installed we receive certificates stating how many beverage cartons we have recovered, how many trees we have saved and how much carbon dioxide we have avoided.

The schedule for the week was as follows:

Monday 23rd May:

Sustainability Poster Competition

Tuesday 24th May:

Waste Mountain in the main hall

Wednesday 25th May:

Hathershaw Newsletter Sustainability Special

Thursday 26th May:

‘Which Bin?’ Competition

Friday 27th May:

Sustainability Pledge Form

‘Meat Free Friday’ in the canteen