As a Green School, our strategic plan aims to raise awareness of the environment, encourage recycling, composting, reducing waste and protecting biodiversity. The Green Schools Group has over 30 members that meet every Monday at lunch time. Any student who is interested in helping make our school a greener one is welcome to attend.
The school has already been awarded 4 Green School Flags; the Litter, Waste, and Energy Flag, the Water Flag, and more recently the Travel flag. To celebrate this award, we had a ceremony with Mr. Dunne on a beautiful sunny morning on the 15th of October. The 1st and 6th year students, as well as our Green Schools Committee attended while our Green Team prefects, Sarah and Katie raised the flag. See images above.
The green team is now working on the theme of 'Biodiversity' and we aim to achieve this green flag in the next 2 years.
So far this term, the Green Team have worked together to raise awareness about fast fashion and how dangerous it is on our environment. They decided to host a Dalkey DEPOP in our concert hall. All the students in our school brought in their old and unwanted clothing so the green team could sell each item for as little as €1 to raise funds to be spent on other Green Schools products such as bird feeders for our school grounds. This turned out to be a roaring success as this initiative raised over €700 to be put towards other products that can help us to protect biodiversity.
After Christmas, the Green Team will be participating in a Investigate Woodlands Project, in which a representative from An Taisce will be coming out to our school grounds and will teach the students about the different plant species here in Loreto Abbey Dalkey. The students will also get to plant 2 new spindle trees during this workshop.
In January, the students will also learn how to build a wormery here on our school grounds. They have collected 6 black bags full of leaves back in October and understand that they are doing this to try and protect biodiversity.
The students in the green team are currently discussing how to build insect hotels and plan to bring in the different materials to build them on the first week back after the Christmas break and these will also be placed around our school grounds.
Please see photos attached of the day we raised the flag, our Green School's notice board, a stunning poster on Biodiversity that one of our Green School members made and even a boomerang that our prefects made during the Dalkey DEPOP.