Over the last two weeks, the Green Schools team at An Taisce and Repak have been travelling the country to award Green Flags to over 250 schools. I was there at the first flag ceremony in Galway and what a success it was. We had a morning and an afternoon session, awarding flags to schools in Galway City and County, Mayo, Roscommon and Leitrim. I met girls and boys receiving their first green flag from senior infant classes and older students from primary schools receiving their third green flag for the water programme.
I also attended the Dublin ceremonies in Croke Park. We used to joke that the Green Schools programme was getting so big that eventually we'd need somewhere the size of Croke Park to have the awards ceremony!! There are now over 3,100 schools in the programme and we needed two days at Croke Park to give out all the flags! What a busy two days it was too. We had schools from all over Leinster, travelling up early in the morning from places such as Wicklow and Monaghan to receive the prestigious green flag.
On the first day of the Croke Park events, Repak launched a Schools Carbon Calculator. Repak has been sponsoring Green Schools since 2008 and has committed €1 million to the programme to 2011. We designed the calculator specifically with the programme in mind to help schools achieve their goal and to get a good understanding of how they are doing on reducing their carbon footprint. With the calculator we were able to figure out that all the schools in the programme have helped to save over 7,000 tonnes of carbon emissions. Also, over 200 million litres of clean drinking water has been saved; enough to fill 85 Olympic sized pools. And if that wasn't enough 500,000 litres of petrol have been saved in the transport part of the programme; that's enough to keep a car going for 5 million kilometres!
To use the carbon calculator for your schools and to see how you're doing against the national average of all Irish schools you can access the Repak Green Schools Carbon Calculator on www.greenschoolsireland.org, or go to the Repak website; www.repak.ie. To find out more on how schools across the country are doing in the Green Schools Programme log onto the press release section of our website. Or if you want to check your own carbon footprint, follow the links to the Repak homepage to use our carbon calculator for homes
