Pupils and staff at St Stephen’s Infant School in Kingswood are enjoying their new green accolade: Yellow Pages Recycling Champions for England 2009. They are also looking forward to spending their well-earned £1,000 prize money.
Fifty-two schools in South Gloucestershire took part in the Yellow Woods Challenge this year, collecting a total of 16,039 Yellow Pages between them. SITA South Gloucestershire ran the project, collecting the directories from schools and recycling them by making them into notice boards. Pupils were also taught about how recycling can protect habitats through lessons and assemblies.
Recent improvements to the household paper collections mean that residents can now also recycle their Yellow Pages directory by putting it in their green recycling bag or box.
St Stephen’s Infant School came top of the large schools category in the English finals of the Yellow Woods Challenge, the environmental campaign for schools run by Yellow Pages working in partnership with the Woodland Trust and local authorities.
The school’s 249 pupils recycled a massive 1,608 old Yellow Pages directories when the new ones were delivered last year – equivalent to six old directories per pupil.
Forty seven local authorities across England ran the Yellow Woods Challenge, involving a total of 1072 schools and 249,455 pupils. The recycling scores from all the local heats were entered into the English finals where The Willows in Blackpool triumphed in the small schools category and Arden Grove Infant School, Norwich, scooped the medium schools prize.
For every pound awarded to schools in prize money, Yellow Pages has donated a matching pound to the Woodland Trust’s children’s tree planting campaign, ‘Tree For All’.
Cllr Heather Goddard, executive member for community services, said: “Congratulations to the pupils at St Stephen’s Infant School on their new green title. It is always encouraging to see young people getting involved with their local communities in projects which will help them to learn about the importance of recycling and its impact on the environment.”
Tim Ruck, Headteacher at St Stephen’s Infant School, said: “I am really pleased about the result. The whole community pulled together to achieve this and it is an incredible achievement. We have plenty of ideas of how to spend the money and we will be asking the children to help us decide.”
Kimberley Watts-Fitzsimmons, corporate responsibility manager at Yell – the publisher of Yellow Pages directories, said: “It’s a great pleasure to reward the winning schools for their outstanding achievements. I’d also like to thank all the schools and councils in England who always take the competition to heart – together you’ve made a massive contribution towards the environment.”
The Yellow Woods Challenge is undergoing a major strategic review and will relaunch in summer 2010 – for more information, visit www.yellow-woods.co.uk. For details of Yellow Pages recycling facilities, visit: www.yellgroup.com or call your local council.
Source: South Gloucestershire Council
