If you’re looking for ways to help teach and encourage your students to be more eco-friendly, take a look at these five simple tips for a greener classroom.
1. Organise a classroom / multi-classroom car share
Try to encourage the students in your class, who are driven to school to take part in a car pool. You could help organise this in your class. To encourage your students to organise car shares maybe you could try maintaining a league table showing who has saved the most petrol (which can also be converted into carbon emissions figures) by reducing the number of cars on the road. By making it competitive it might motivate your students to do their best.
2. Discourage Palm Oil
Do a quick survey of what your students are packing for lunch. If they’re packing the common foods that contain palm oil they’re not only damaging they’re health they’re also contributing to the destruction of rainforests.
Demand for palm oil, a vegetable oil present in 1 in 10 supermarket products, is the most significant cause of rainforest loss in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Foods that contain palm oil that parents might be packing in their school lunches include:
- Cereal bars/granola bars
- Bread
- Chocolate bars
- And much more — 1 in 10 supermarket products
Try doing a search for foods that don’t contain palm oil and encourage your students to choose them or ask their parents to choose them.
3. Teach your students how to print double sided
If it’s that time of term, when projects are due in and you know your students are going to be printing out some hefty projects that may never get recycled this could be a great tree saving tip. Make sure all your students print out double sided. Not only will they save paper, they’ll be reducing carbon emissions — carbon is produced in the manufacture and transport of consumables like paper, so be reducing our usage consumables like paper, we not only save trees, we also reduce our carbon emissions.
You can try using this guide on how to print double sided to help, although your printer options may be a little different to ours at The Consortium depending on your operating system and so forth.
4. Encourage composting and healthy natural eating with Tru-Green envelopes
If you allow your students to occasionally snack in class but don’t like the idea of letting them eat junk food that is bad for their health and produces a great deal of rubbish that does not easily decompose, try this idea. Get yourself some Tru-Green 100% compostable and recyclable envelopes and check out this post on how to start a fun eco-friendly class room activity that teaches your students about the environment.
5. Teach your students about local produce
This is something that people often forget about when it comes to the environment, but it can make a big difference. By purchasing locally grown in-season produce (even if it’s just grown somewhere in the UK) you can reduce global carbon emissions. Food grown in foreign counties has to be shipped over here and that burns fuel, producing carbon emissions that go into our atmosphere, contributing towards global warming and causing other environmental damage.
By choosing locally grown food you not only save carbon emissions; you are also supporting local farmers and the British economy.
How are you encouraging your students to be eco-friendly?
If you are encouraging your students to be eco-friendly in some way not mentioned in these five tips, why not post a comment using the form below to share your good ideas.
lhuff
Great tips. Here’s another: post materials–like syllabus, classroom rules, supply lists–online rather than distributing paper copies. Any teacher can create a wiki or blog in about thirty seconds. Posting these documents online is simple, saves paper, and keeps them handy for parents and students long after they’ve lost the original copy the teacher would have distributed.
I’m trying to help spread the message to other teachers, promoting “Eco-friendly Educators” via my workshop wiki.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:06 pmChris
I like that, that’s a good way of thinking.
Something we’re planning to do at some point in the future is build an online resource for teachers containing links such as the one you posted to make it easier for teachers to do things like that.
I know that teachers use MASSES of paper in the classroom. A lot of this could be made digital (and perhaps made more accessable with the use of search technology and digital filing systems + easy direct transferral of documents from computer to computer). It does seem to make sense.
Great tip Lisa, thanks for your comment.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:31 am