The three Rs have taken on a new relevance for year 7 students at Culcheth high school, near Warrington, Cheshire.
They now stand for reuse, reduce and recycle, and pupils use first-hand experience from trips to landfill sites and an incinerator plant as part of an environmental awareness project that aims to bring practical sustainability into the classroom.
"Students were given a bin bag of clean rubbish with laminated cards representing food and were asked how they would dispose of the waste," says head of geography Laura Lakin. "They realised there was not a lot left after they had applied the three Rs."
The school has harnessed the project's impetus for the 2005-2006 year 7 curriculum plan. In art, for example, students make their own sketch pads with recycled paper. A year 7 action group, drawn from the more talented and motivated students, meets weekly; one of its first initiatives was to invite Warrington borough council's recycling officer into the school.
The biggest bone of contention was how to recycle the plastic drinks bottles that proliferate because cans are banned from school. On learning that such recycling would require extra facilities and investment, the action group investigated how the school pays for waste disposal in general.
After discovering the school had 20 large industrial bins that cost £6 each to be emptied weekly, the group started a paper recycling programme. The paper is now collected separately, reducing the volume of waste and cutting the number of bins emptied each week to 19.
"We receive a credit for £236 a year from Warrington borough council for the paper, and the action group joined forces with the school council to ask that the credit be spent on extending the recycling facilities," says Lakin.
A feasibility study is examining how to enlarge the site and how to run openings for Culcheth residents out of school hours. It will allow the school to separate cardboard and plastics, and could generate an annual credit of £1,500 a year from the council for these materials.
The move will also cut another two bins, saving a further £12 a week on collections.