East Acton Primary School's Cut Your Carbon campaign
30 Jan 2025
What does cutting carbon mean?
Full article and further information
We want to tell you about how we’re working to cut our carbon footprint and help our planet!
It’s been amazing to see how small changes in our school can make a big difference to the environment.
We hope our story, at East Acton Primary School, will inspire other schools to join the Cut Your Carbon campaign and become eco-warriors too!
What does cutting carbon mean?
You might be wondering, what does it really mean to “cut carbon”?
Well, carbon emissions are gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) that go into the air and trap heat, making the planet warmer. This is called climate change. Cutting carbon means using less energy, recycling more, and taking actions that reduce these harmful gases. It might sound challenging, but when we all do our part, we can help make the world a cleaner, healthier place!
Our journey as eco-warriors
At East Acton Primary School, we started learning about climate change, in subjects such as PSHE, science and geography, and how important it is to look after our planet. We were surprised to find out how much energy we were using and how much rubbish we were throwing away. That’s when we decided to join the Cut Your Carbon campaign and do everything we could to make our school more eco-friendly!
Here are some of the main strategies and activities that our Eco warriors, accompanied by school councillors and rights-respecting ambassadors, have employed running this "Cut Your Carbon" campaign:
• Eco-friendly harvest festival boxes designed for sending donated food to a local food bank
• Classes designing, making and selling eco-friendly products for our Christmas Enterprise Fair
• Reflective key chains sold around the school to raise awareness about road safety and being a road safety hero
• Advocating for change in child-led assemblies
• Participating in meetings alongside school councillors and rights-respecting ambassadors
• Creating posters to advocate for our children’s right for a safe environment and how the community can support this.
What we have done
Here’s what we’ve been doing through the campaign:
- No Power Hour: We realized that we were leaving lights and computers on all the time! Now, we make sure to turn them off when we don’t need them. We even tried to see who could save the most energy each week.
- Go plant-based for a day: Meat production is responsible for around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. By switching from a meat-based diet to a plant-based diet, for just one day, we can help to reduce emissions by nearly 3kg CO2e
- Substitute 4 baths for 4 showers and limit them to 4 minutes: Cleaning and pumping water to our homes creates carbon emissions. So does generating energy to heat it. This means that shorter showers are good for our planet!
- Turn down the heating by 1° for a week: Heating is the biggest source of carbon emissions in many homes. In completing this challenge, we hoped to prevent an additional 6kg CO2e!
- Buy nothing new for 1 month: The production of every item that we buy has a carbon footprint, so if we purchased 1kg less items during the month, we could save an average of 6kg CO2e.
- Make 5 miles of travel ‘active’: We wanted to help reduce the pollution from cars, so we have started walking, biking, or carpooling to school whenever we can. It's not only good for the planet, but it’s great for our health too!
Why it matters
By making these small changes at school, we are helping to cut down on carbon emissions and reduce waste. We have learned that every little thing we do makes a big difference. Even though we’re just children, we know that we can help save the planet—one step at a time! Our school has already noticed less waste and littering, we’ve saved energy by turning off lights, we are using less paper for our lessons and we have instigated a new change in our lunch menu, which involves a meat-free day.
We want other schools to join the Cut Your Carbon campaign and become eco-warriors just like us!
What’s next for us?
We’re not stopping here! We plan to keep finding new ways to cut our carbon and spread the word to others. We’re going to host more eco-themed events and keep learning about ways to protect the environment. We’re also excited to see other schools joining the campaign and making a difference.
Becoming an Eco-Warrior doesn’t have to be hard. It can start with small changes, and before you know it, you’ll be making a huge impact on the planet. Join the Cut Your Carbon campaign, get your school involved, and let’s work together to help the Earth.
Full article and further information
Read the full article including information on how by participating in the "Cut Your Carbon" campaign, we are not only reducing our environmental impact but also ensuring that we are protecting children’s rights to a healthy and safe environment. This coincides with the articles stated in The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).