This week the eco warriors had our first meeting! We discussed Cut Your Carbon month, which is happening during November, and decided how we could share this with our classes. 

During the first week back after half term, each eco warrior will be making a presentation to their class about why it is important to cut carbon levels and setting a challenge for their peers. At the end of the month, they will collect data to find how many challenges Westacre children were able to complete and how much carbon we were able to cut!

ECO Warriors - September 2023

Congratulations to all the year 6 and 7 children who have been chosen to be eco warriors this year following successful applications. I am looking forward to reading applications from the year 5 children too! 

As ECO Warriors we….

• Evaluate our school environment. We think about what is good about our school environment but also want isn’t so good and could be made better.
• Then come up with action plans in order to improve our school environment.
• Meet regularly to discuss how we are progressing with our action plans.
• Take notes about what we discussed in our meetings.
• Tell our class mates about what we are currently working on; either in well-being time, assemblies, in school newsletters, on the school website or on twitter.
• Have an ECO warrior in each class so that each year group is fairly represented.

We intend to:

• Improve the environment at Westacre and also in the local community.
• Share with everyone how important it is for us all to look after the world around us.
• Learn what we can do in order to look after the environment.
• Increase our knowledge and understanding of recycling, energy usage and sustainable living.

 
 Eco warriors will be expected to regularly attend meetings (usually one lunchtime each half term, but possibly more frequently depending on how much discussion we need, or how much news/progress we have to share). They will then feedback what we have discussed in our meetings to their classmates during registration. If any of their classmates had any suggestions about how we could improve our school environment, they would speak to them and then they would share these ideas at our meeting.

This year we will be continuing to work towards earning the 'Eco-schools Green Flag Award' for Westacre.

Meeting with Counciller Alex Sinton

On Wednesday we met with Counciller Alex Sinton. He discussed Wychavon's Intelligently Green plan with us. Wychavon are planning to reduce their carbon emssions. One of the ways they are going to do this is by building a new leisure centre in Droitwich: the existing one is responsible for 13% of Wychavon's carbon emissions! 

We discussed the importance of recycling and played a recycling game on the council website:

https://www.wychavon.gov.uk/waste-and-recycling/waste-sorting-game 

Environmental Review

Earlier this year the Eco warriors questioned their classes about the following topics in order to find out what good things Westacre is already doing for the environment.

• litter
• energy
• marine
• global citizenship
• biodiversity
• transport
• water
• healthy living
• school grounds
• waste

We discovered that we are doing well in regards to global citizenship and the school grounds. However, we need to work on our responses to litter, water, marine and energy.

In order to go for our green flag award we need to choose three topics to work on. We have chosen litter, energy and marine.

Action Plan

Litter

In order to reduce the amount of litter around school we have made posters to encourage people to put their litter in the bin and been on regular litter picks.

It is our aim to raise some money to have more bins put around school.

Energy

Our plan to use less energy is to encourage staff to turn off lights and computers when not in use and close their blinds at the end of the day. We also plan to investigate the possibility of the school having an energy meter and installing some renewable energy sources.

Marine

We would like to find out if the fish served at lunchtime is caught sustainably. We would also like to encourage a school trip to a beach, river, lake or aquarium. It is our hope that eventually we could ban single use plastics across the school. It is also our hope that our cleaners could use environmentally friendly cleaning products. Finally we think we need to spend some time learning about marine life conservation.

These will be our actions over the coming weeks.