Sustainable Snack: A Primary School Enviro Girls Initiative
This term, our Enviro Girls have launched Sustainable Snack, a new student-led initiative designed to reduce unnecessary waste across the Primary School and encourage more sustainable everyday habits.
The initiative grew from the girls’ desire to identify practical ways our Primary community can make a difference. They recognised that morning snack time provides one small but very tangible opportunity: across hundreds of girls, reducing even one piece of single-use packaging each day has the potential to significantly reduce the waste we generate over time.
The idea is deliberately simple. For their morning snack, girls are encouraged to bring something that creates little or no waste. This might be fresh fruit or vegetables, or snacks such as crackers, popcorn or homemade treats packed in reusable containers, lunchboxes or beeswax wraps, rather than individually packaged items. There is an added benefit too, with morning snack providing a good opportunity for girls to choose nutritious ‘brain food’ to fuel their learning.
Importantly, the Enviro Girls want Sustainable Snack to create a culture, rather than a competition. We know that lasting change is more likely to come when sustainable choices become habitual, rather than something we do for a prize or reward. For this reason, there will be no tallies, prizes or incentives, nor will lunchboxes be policed. Instead, the focus will be on building awareness, encouraging thoughtful choices and helping the girls understand that small individual actions, when adopted collectively, can have a meaningful impact.
The Enviro Girls launched Sustainable Snack at Primary Assembly and will continue to drive the initiative through classroom visits, posters and reminders around the School. In doing so, they are not only advocating for a more sustainable Primary School, but also experiencing what it means to identify an issue, propose a practical response and lead change within their own community.
Our hope is that, over time, bringing a waste-free morning snack will simply become part of what we do at SCEGGS.
We would greatly appreciate the support of our Primary families in helping the girls establish this new routine. Sustainable Snack is a relatively small change, but that is precisely the point: when a community makes thoughtful choices consistently, small actions can add up to a significant difference.
Helen Dempsey
Head of Primary School
