Eco Schools with Edd Moore – Nape 054
Please welcome our new National Council member Edd Moore.
Edd is a teacher and Eco Coordinator at Damers First School, Dorchester, Dorset. Edd has built up the eco work at Damers over the last 8 years from a blank canvas. Under his leadership, achieved the Eco Schools Green Flag three times in 2016, 2018, 2020, won Eco Schools Primary Eco School of the Year, Surfers Against Sewage Plastic Free Schools Champion and Jane Goodall Roots and Shoots Best Group in 2019.
With the help of volunteers Edd started a school garden from scratch including a bottle greenhouse so children can garden every afternoon planting vegetables which are then used by them to produce meals. The school gained RHS 5* status in 2017.
For three years running the school won the Young Enterprise Fiver Challenge with their environmentally friendly products including: Garden Grenades – recycled school paper mixed with wild flower seeds; Spick n Span – a multipurpose cleaning product; Waxtastic No Plastic – an alternative to cling film raising a total of £7500 in the process which was used to fund a nature area with pond and a giant solar powered stopwatch for the playground.
Edd has made Damers into one of the top Eco Schools in the country embedding the environment into the school’s curriculum. He started the Plastic Free Dorchester campaign with the Damers children who have made the school single use plastic free and help the town to achieve Surfers Against Sewage Plastic Free Community Status in July 2019.
The children and Edd took their “All in” Deposit Return Campaign to Westminster and met Michael Gove and the children appeared on Newsround. They have also inspired the community and people further afield to collect items that normally cannot be recycled at the curb side such as crisp packets, biscuit wrappers toothpaste tubes to raise money for the school’s eco projects and outside area, saving 100s of kg of waste going into land fill. The community has collected so much of this recycling that the local WI now sort and pack it up on a regular basis. They also formed part of the team to make “Boomerang Bags” an idea Edd discovered in Australia where groups make material bags for people to borrow from shops and so reduce the use of plastic bags. Prince Charles launched this initiative in May 2019 in Dorchester, even providing material for some of the bags.
Read Edd’s article in Primary First here.
http://www.damers.dorset.sch.uk/curriculum/eco-schools/eco-news/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/edd-moore-a0369b86/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/plasticfreedorchester/