By Rebecca Flanagan
November 18-22, is Clean Air Week and Green-Schools Travel Officers are delivering Clean Air focused workshops to Green-Schools around Ireland. The week-long event is the newest campaign from the Green-Schools Travel programme and is focused on raising awareness of, and taking action of, air pollution at school gates.
The Green-Schools Committee at St. Tiernan’s Community School had the pleasure to meet their new Green-Schools Travel Officer Robbie Egan today, along with Rebecca who is already working with the group on the Erasmus project. Robbie introduced students to the newly developed Green-Schools Air Quality resource which focuses on what is air pollution, how is it produced and what are the solutions to improve air quality. Students came up with ideas to improve air quality on a local scale. They looked at a particulate matter reading in the nearest town in Dublin and compared it to the safe standards issued by the World Health Organisation. PM 10 readings were recorded as being well below the unsafe standards. However, PM2.5 results were showing only an adequately safe level of particulate matter.
During the campaign, Green-Schools have been asking students and
communities all around Ireland to make a pledge to #BeatAirPollution in order to create a healthy environment around the school gate and to improve well-being by travelling to school actively.
We hope to be able to showcase these initiatives during the next LTT in Lithuania! In the meantime, if any of our Erasmus partners wish to get involved they can find out more https://greenschoolsireland.org/clean-air-week-2019/
