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Eco-Schools

We were recently awarded our sixth Green Flag!

Do you think our school is an eco-friendly school?  Please get in touch with any of the Eco Warriors to let us know if you have any ideas for making Arrochar Primary even more eco-friendly!

Our Current Eco Topics

We are working hard to improve three areas.  These are WATER, ENERGY AND LITTER.

Litter

We use our bins to keep our playground tidy, and encourage everyone to bin their litter.  Our litter picking rota is helping the grounds stay litter free; we like to be as green and clean as possible. Each term we have an eco/gardening afternoon involving all classes, staff and volunteers from our community.  We all help to ensure our school grounds are tidy by doing some weeding, planting, sweeping and litter-picking.

Recycling

Thank you to all of our parents and friends of the school, who use our Rag Bag recycling bin. We have been recycling lots of clothes and raising money for school funds!  Everyone at Arrochar Primary also recycles paper and plastics and we have a compost bin. We compost all peelings and cores and use the compost to grow vegetables. If anyone has any other ideas for recycling, please make a suggestion to the Eco Warriors.  Keep up the great work everyone!

Gardening

In our weekly gardening club, we sow seeds, plant bulbs to grow lots of different plants, vegetables and flowers.  We like to taste the fruit and vegetables we have grown and sometimes take them home too.  We are growing apple trees in our school orchard.  We have used our apples to make apple crumble in the canteen. We also used our apples to make bird feed for the birds that visit our playground.  Our garden is great!

Outdoor Learning

We are so lucky to have such a lovely playground.  We love having lessons outside and down at the shore.  When it is dry, we often have our lunch outside instead of the canteen. We love playing down at the burn and making dens in the forest next to the school.

Biodiversity 

The garden attracts animals and insects.  Here are some of the places we have created to improve biodiversity on our school grounds:

  • We have a bug hotel.
  •  We made a pond for our garden to encourage frog spawn to develop into frogs, and to help larger animals if they are thirsty.
  • We put our fruit skins and leftovers from lunch into the compost bin.  This helps to feed the worms in our wormery.  We use the worm ‘juice’ as a fertiliser in our garden.
  • We have many bird boxes.
  • We also have a bird bath.
  • We have pictures around the school to tell pupils about different birds.  We also have bird feeders to attract even more birds!  We have a bird watching station so we can see and identify all the different birds that we have at school.

The Last Straw Campaign

We have been campaigning to help our local area become straw free.  We sent letters to local businesses to ask for their support to reduce the number of plastic straws they provide to customers.  We would like to thank those who have replied and are supporting our campaign.

Reducing Waste

To reduce the amount of throwaway plastic in our school, we have been monitoring the plastic waste bin in our canteen.  Thank you to everyone who is taking part.  We now have very little in this bin after lunch!

Food Waste

We have also been looking at food waste and we challenged the school to think about their portion size and try to reduce the volume of food waste.  We have made great progress in this area.  Well done, Arrochar Primary!

Visit the Eco-Schools Scotland website.

Visit the website of the GRAB Trust – Group for Recycling in Argyll and Bute.