Green Schools Alliance Highlights St. Andrew’s Success
The international association of sustainable schools, Green Schools Alliance, has selected St. Andrew’s as their featured school for December 2015. Senior Read Barbee ‘16 wrote an article summarizing the school's improvements since the student-run Coalition for the Environment began at the Upper School last year. Click here to read Read’s full article on the GSA website.
Read says, “The changes happening here are incredibly inspiring. I feel that I am at a school that truly cares about mitigating its environmental impact, and that my fellow students and I can play a meaningful role in how we go about making those changes. Above all else, St. Andrew’s values its close-knit and supportive community, and I believe it is this environment that has allowed us to make such large strides so quickly. I have great hopes for this school and its sustainability efforts, and I look forward to seeing how my fellow students and I will improve the world with the skills we have learned here.”
Highlights from the year include:
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Highlights from the year include:
- Installing two water bottle filling stations in high-traffic areas on campus, diverting the equivalent of 60,000 plastic bottles
- Converting a large number of trash bins into recycling bins, doubling the recycling capacity
- Reducing environmental impact of annual Candy Grams by substituting fair-trade chocolate bars, and hand-writing messages on recycled seed paper
- Installing LED lights in the school’s chemistry classrooms, saving more than 6700kWh of electricity and $390 dollars over three months
- Building a hanging herb garden
- Auditing the campus waste stream and implementing composting system (recently diverting 50% of waste to compost and 48% to recycling bins on St. Andrew’s Day!)
