Green flag flies over Blakestown

John Gormley, Minister for the Environment was the guest of honour at the recent celebration in Blakestown Community School to mark the awarding of a Green Flag to the school.

The school’s participation in the awards scheme was organised by a committee of pupils drawn from the O’Kelly 1st year class under the guidance of teachers Shauna Keys and Claire Prendergast.

Speaking at the reception for the Minister, principal Victor Black said “we promote a great respect for our environment in the school and this forms part of our CPSE course in Blakestown. Winning this green flag means that care of our environment will form an even bigger part of the school ethos for pupils in the future.”

Two of the students involved in the project, Lee Blake and Samantha made a short presentation about the work that the students’ committee had undertaken to win the flag. According to Samantha, “once a week during our religion class we go around the school and collect every single piece of paper that has been thrown into the recycling bins. Every student in the class has a special area of the school to collect from.”

Among the other recycling initiatives introduced in the school she listed the fact that “all of the waste toast from our breakfast club is being re-used to feed the birds. They are very happy with this. 63% of the bulbs in our school have been switched/replaced with energy efficient bulbs. Roughly 90% of our paper is being recycled. We now have 3 large green bins that are filled and collected every 2 weeks,” she said.

According to Lee “as well as recycling paper we have loads of other things happening every day in our school. Our old mobile phones are sent off to the Jack and Jill Children’s Foundation which raises money for children who are very ill in Ireland.

As a result of switching from ESB to Eirtricity we have saved the release of 85,707 kilograms of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. All the waste from our woodwork room used to be thrown out. Now it is cut up and is available for anyone to take home for their fire,” said Lee.

Minister Gormley congratulated the students on their work to achieve the flag for the school. “The fact that you have changed the light bulbs in the school is music to my ears,” he said. “We are introducing legislation to get rid of low efficiency bulbs. Even this one small change in our homes would make a huge difference in our country.”

According to the Minister, “CO2 emissions from the transport sector in Ireland have increased by 180% since 1990. We can reduce this significantly by not using our cars and by walking and cycling. Recent statistics have shown that in some secondary schools more leaving cert students are driving to schools than cycling.”

In a question and answer session the Minister responded to a question about introducing nuclear energy in Ireland, by saying “I think we should have a debate on the issue, but I don’t think Ireland is the right place for nuclear power stations. Dealing with the waste from nuclear energy still poses major problems. We should use more renewable resources like wave and wind to generate our electricity. I believe that we can bring our use of renewable resources up to 42% by the year 2020.”

In response to another question, the Minister said “dealing with food waste is the biggest headache I have as it causes us the biggest problems in land fills. Bio-degradable waste is a huge source of methane gas which damages the ozone layer. When you are going for your next green flag, maybe you might look at how to deal with food waste in the school,” he suggested.

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