Banchory School Bags Green Award

An innovative project to reduce the amount of plastic bags being thrown out has helped scoop a major environmental award for a north-east school.

Banchory Primary School was named as a winner of the Green School Awards after their project, entitled 'Bags for Banchory', got the judges vote.

Devised by the Young People's Trust for the Environment and supported by TOTAL, the Green School Awards are an annual competition designed to help young people learn about caring for the environment and the importance of science in providing future solutions too today's ecological problems.

They are open to groups of young people aged 7-11.

Now in their second year, the Green School Awards have seen participation from around 6,000 young people.


The Awards encourage cross-curricular study and assist teachers with the delivery of a diverse range of National Curriculum topics.

Banchory's project researched the use of plastic bags whilst shopping. After visiting a local supermarket, the children calculated how many carrier bags were used by shoppers in a single hour.

From this, they calculated how many bags would be used in a year, which from this one shop alone totalled over one million bags.

The pupils then designed and produced their own reusable bags that they sold to the local population.

The bags proved so popular that they sold their first batch of 500 within a couple of days.

All of the children in the winning group have been invited to attend the National Awards Ceremony which will take place at London Zoo in this summer.

Whilst at the Zoo, they will receive a specially commissioned trophy, a cheque for £1,000 for the school, and some great goody bags for all the children.

They will also be in the running to be named national champions and receive an all-expenses-paid environmental holiday.

Director of the Young People’s Trust for the Environment, Peter Littlewood, said: "We are delighted to see the Awards really take off this year.

"It shows that schools are very keen on passing on environment concerns to their pupils, and we have seen some amazing creativity from the young people themselves."

(GK/JM)