Three Valleys Water - Education - Environmental Issues/Citizenship/Sustainability

Eco Centre

In February, 2002 The Clay Lane Environment and Education Centre was awarded Green Flag Eco-Centre Status by ENCAMS (formerly the Tidy Britain Group), the organisation which runs the National Eco-Schools Scheme. Click here to go to the ENCAMS website.

To meet the requirements of the top award we had to demonstrate: that we monitor our water and energy use and reduce waste; that we reuse and recycle as many materials as possible and reduce the amount of rubbish produced at the Centre. We also buy as many products as we can that are made from recycled paper and choose to provide fair trade tea and coffee in our kitchen. We encourage suppliers to deliver our orders in one go to keep their journeys to us to a minimum. We are due to be inspected again in February 2005 and are working on other initiatives to develop this work further.

We ask all visitors to the Environment and Education Centre to help us in our effort to use resources wisely and to think about packaging and rubbish. Having given schools information about what we can reuse, recycle and compost, we issue a challenge to school-children to leave us the least amount of rubbish from their lunches. A prize is given to the school party who leave the least amount of "real" rubbish per person over the academic year.

As part of our work we can support schools in carrying out a water audit to identify how much water, if any, is being wasted and to give ideas about how to cut this wastage down. The audit, together with some ideas for action, will earn the school an Eco Schools Bronze Award.

Both of these initiatives help the children learn about both sustainability and citizenship.