Eco-committee

The Eco Committee are proud to announce that we have achieved our 5th Eco Schools Platinum award! We are extremely happy with this achievement and we are excited to implement this years targets and events! 

The Eco committee have been very busy creating an Eco code for this year. It wasn’t an easy task and all pupils worked collaboratively to contribute their views and opinions to enable us to share our vision with the whole school. The pupils created a catchy rap that incorporates the 9 areas of the Eco Schools code.
The pupils independently created this document for our Eco Committee display in school. 

A selection of our recent activities and achievements.

Reducing Waste from Bridgend Catering Services

We wrote to Bridgend County Borough Council to voice our concerns about the amount of waste which our school kitchen creates that is not recycled.   Our main concerns were:

1. We are provided with plastic straws for our milk, which cannot be recycled (we have since stopped using these)

2. The amount of food waste (we think about 15 - 20 bags per week) that go into a general waste collection and are not sent to a food processing facility

and

3. The amount of tins, cardboard and glass that catering do no provide recycling collection facilities for.

We have recently received a response from the director of education, Lindsay Harvey. His response suggested that MYH would be in a ‘trail run’ project to recycle our food waste when our current recycling contract runs out.

In the meantime, we have organised the recycling facilities at MYH to improve the effectiveness. We introduced 3 bins that are colour coded;

Red bin – non-recycles

Green bin – mixed recyclables

Yellow bin – crisp packets

Miss Hughes can already see a great difference in the amount of rubbish bags that are collected from the staff room and curriculum kitchen each week.

Crisp Packet Recycling

Through the Walkers Crisps recycling scheme, since 2019, all the crisp packets that children at Maes yr Haul bring to school in their packed lunches are all sent off for recycling.  Unfortunately, it's not practical for us to set up a public drop-off station at the school, but with over 500 children at our school, our collections soon build up.  This, along with our paper and plastic bottle recycling all helps to significantly reduce our black-bag waste that goes to landfill.

Toilet Twinning

During 2018, the eco-committee championed a charity to raise funds to fund building toilet facilities in a variety of third world villages where currently, they do not have any.   Through a variety of activities, such as "wear blue for a loo", and in partnership with the charity 'toilet twinning', we raised enough money to twin all of our toilets (22 rooms in all) with different villages across the world.   Our 'toilet roll of honour' sits proudly in our main school foyer, showing all the villages that we have twinned with. Thank you to everyone for the support and participation so far. We greatly appreciate it.

Our ongoing initiatives

Bright sparks – monitor the use of electricity in school. Carry out spot checks in each classroom to see who has left lights, monitors or whiteboards on when not in the room or at lunch/break.

Litter Monitors – collect litter twice a week from around the school grounds and keep a record.

Crisp Packet Collectors – collect the crisp packets twice a week, weigh the crisp packets and add to our current weight.

Paper Monitors – empty paper bins once a week and collect the unused paper from the ICT suits. These are made into wet play books each week.