School children in Shrewsbury & Atcham have been doing their bit for the environment and learning more about recycling. SABC have for the third year now organised a ‘yellow woods challenge’ in their area. So over January and February 2008, almost all the primary schools in the area have been acting as collection hubs for Yellow Pages and participating in Yell sponsored environmental education campaigns.
Because of various quality control issues our paper mill in Shotton (the largest manufacturer of newsprint in the UK) cannot accept Yellow Pages. As such SABC arranges special separate collections so they can go to another paper mill to be turned into lower grade material.
Cllr. Mrs. Judith Williams, the Portfolio Holder for recycling and waste services at SABC says
"I just want to say a big well done and thank you to all the schools who took part this year. To the pupils, teachers, parents and governors and many other countless volunteers who gave up their time to help us recycle more. Of course the winners deserve special praise but taking part means that all the children are learning about the environment and we hope they’ll grow up to be better citizens as a result".
This year another great effort by the schools has seen nearly 5,000 old Yellow Pages directories collected between them. It was certainly an outstanding effort by the winning school who collected over a third of that on their own, but all who collected made a good contribution to the overall total. The challenge is not just about collecting the most though of course and we hope that all the schools who took part enjoyed it and learnt something new about their environment and about trees and paper recycling in particular.
From the results below, you can see that by a ‘country mile’ the deserved local winners are the Grange Infants School, from Bainbridge Green on Harlescott Grange. The top six schools in terms of number of yellow pages collected, per pupil receive prizes as outlined below:
1. Winners - Gold Oak certificate, £300 and 'seeds to trees' kit - Grange Infants School (12.60 - average no. of Yellow Pages per pupil)
2. Runners-Up - Silver Birch certificate, £200 and 'seeds to trees' kit - Mount Pleasant Infant School (4.10)
3. Third Place- Bronze Beech certificate, £100 and 'seeds to trees' kit - Greenacres Primary School (1.56)
4. 4th Place - Highly Commended Certificate and 'seeds to trees' kit - Trinity C.E. Primary School (1.38)
5. 5th Place - Commended Certificate and 'seeds to trees' kit - Woodfield Infants School (1.25)
6. 6th Place - Commended Certificate and 'seeds to trees' kit - St Giles CofE Primary School (1.14)
We also chose to award a £100 bonus prize to the school collecting the overall most directories in total and this was the overall winners Grange Infants School who managed a very impressive 1,714! This is a phenomenal achievement, which on its own translates to about 3 tonnes of paper recycling! (Bear in mind that a typical paper mill uses 50 percent less energy to make paper from recycled paper than it would to make paper from fresh wood fibres and by recycling a single tonne of paper you are reducing the need for about 17 trees!)
This takes their total winnings (which is all kindly donated by Yell Ltd) to £400 so congratulations to them and all prize-winners. We hope that they will use the money for a nice little project to enable them to further improve their school environment. SABC will be organising a prize giving ceremony shortly.
If anyone has any queries about recycling or waste management issues generally please contact SABC on 01743 281155 or email recycling@shrewsbury.gov.uk
A to Z
