Grassroots environmentalists
IT’S 10.30am on a Tuesday and 25 boys and girls sit attentively on little doughnut-shaped, plastic-covered cushions.
Olga Fitzgerald and the other two preschool teachers at the Bright Sparks childcare centre just outside Mitchelstown are hosting the monthly class meeting about their Green Schools programme.
Jim Donnelly, the litter warden in the North Cork town, is on a visit to talk to the class about the delicate subject of dog poo. He asks how many children have dogs, and about a dozen hands go up.
Some shout: “I have two.”
It turns into quite a competition, by the end of which some try to convince him they have 100 dogs at home.
“And what,” asks Jim, “do you do to clean up their dog poo on the street?”
“We pick it up with a plastic bag,” they chorus in their teeny voices, one even suggesting that a plastic bottle might be used.
Jim explains that one of his jobs is to make sure everybody puts their litter in the bins in the town, including the dog poo. He has a dual role as litter warden and traffic warden for Cork County Council in Mitchelstown and for Charleville, about 45km away.
One girl reveals that she has a big bin in her back garden, referring to the recycling bin kept at home.
Olga asks the class what kind of things they put into recycling bins.
“Plastic bottles.”
“Paper.”
“You could put old toys that you don’t want in it,” suggests one enthusiastic little girl, “for the kids what have no toys.”
A different kind of recycling maybe, but she has the right idea.
The discussion moves next to energy saving, something at which the children have already excelled.
“What do we do to save energy?” asks Olga.
“Turn off computers.”
“Turn off switches.”
“Close doors.”
“Turn off lights.”
They even have a simple code to keep them on track.
“When we go out,” says Olga, “we always make sure the switch is what?”
“Turned off.”
“Yeah, and we get thumbs up then, don’t we? And what if the lights are left off, we get?”
“Thumbs down,” returns another chorus.
The school already has a green flag for its energy-saving efforts and won a national competition in 2010, with the presentation cheque for €20,000 proudly held aloft by Grace Duggan.
“The older boys and girls won it; I was only in play group. We got money to keep Bright Sparks cosy and warm,” she says, after a little prompting.
Olga explains that they put “a big blanket” around the school. In other words, they put extra insulation into the crèche.
Claire Devaney, the principal at Bright Sparks, explains that these boys and girls will be going to primary school in September. So they are already prepared for the classroom situation and able to concentrate for quite long periods. Most of them attend Bright Sparks five days a week, under the Government-funded free pre-school year scheme.
Olga asks the youngsters how to conserve water. Well, there’s turning off taps and making sure they don’t have leaks.
“When it’s raining we can put out buckets, and what can we do with the water?” Olga asks.
“We can water the plants,” replies one little girl.
The teacher goes to the window to demonstrate a recent experiment the class did to see how plants feed from water. One small white flower is standing in a glass of clear water and a second is in water coloured with a red dye.
After two days in the coloured water, the leaves of the second flower have a red tinge. The class is asked what this tells them.
“That plants drink up the water,” comes the response.
“That’s right. So you all drink milk to stay big and strong, and plants need water to grow too,” Olga tells them.
They even have a class poem to recite on the subject.
“While I’m brushing my teeth, I turn off the tap,
“When I’ve mud on my feet, I shower, not bath,
“Water is special, it falls from the sky,
“It does lots of jobs like keeping plants alive,
“That’s why with water, I should always spare,
“To show Mother Nature just how much I care.”
It’s the work of Ava O’Regan, whose poem was selected as the winner of the competition they had earlier in the year. The compositions of others also adorn the message board of the childcare centre.
Earlier in May, the children took home questionnaires for their families, asking them about the amount of water they use. Olga reads through one of the returned forms.
It details how many times a family flushed the toilet, washed hands, had a shower or bath, used the kitchen sink, filled the kettle, or turned on the dishwasher.
“I’m not going to have a bath anymore, I’m just going to have showers,” said one girl, who has clearly picked up the message.
One parent has put a note at the end of the questionnaire, writing: “I never realised you use so much water in a day, it’s truly an eye-opener. It might be worth swapping the dishwasher for the sink.”
The kids’ parents have also sent back their own tips on ways to reduce the amount of water used at home.
“When clearing the table after meals, use leftover water in drinking glasses to wash off plates instead of pouring the water down the sink,” reads one family’s reply.
Smart thinking indeed, but another bright spark has a different idea of her own that she wants to share with the class.
“Or else, you could water the flowers with it.”
The school is also planning to take up the advice about putting in a special bag into toilet cisterns that will help reduce the amount of water used in every flush, by two litres to seven litres each time.
A similar device was already put into one of the toilets but was not working very well. But a pupil’s father is planning to visit soon and install a different type of bag.
“He’ll bring one of the Harry Hippo bags and he’s going to fit it into the toilet and we’re going to try it out and see how much water we can save,” Olga says.
One girl tells the class that she has a bottle underneath her sink.
“And, every time I let out the water from the drain after I wash my hands, the water goes into the bottle,” she says, as one of the adults in the room quietly suggests a plumber might be needed.
I ask if they have any green flags outside.
“Yeah, we have two. Now we’re getting another one. We need three.”
“We have only two for ages.”
Claire reminds them that they’re working towards a third flag, which will be for the projects they are doing about water.
“Do you know what? It’s actually going to take another year,” she explains, to a response of gasps and shrieks.
“Then you’ll be gone and then the new boys and girls will have to help us finish off for next year,” she tells them.
At the end of the pre-school session at midday, Charlie Hope is collected by his dad Phil. He says that what his four-year-old is learning is definitely filtering through to home.
“We do the recycling at home on Thursdays for the bins, so he helps us sort it all out, the papers and everything,” said Phil. “And now we know all the stuff about water, turning off the taps and generally how much water we use, the stuff we do without thinking, flushing the toilet or how much water we use boiling the kettle.”
Outside the side of the Bright Sparks centre, two boys are tasked with checking the gas meter on the wall near the kitchen window. With a little help from teacher Olga, they write down the numbers from the dial inside the plastic box.
“The first one is a two,” says Conor Russell.
His pal Kyle Roberts then takes the pencil and does his best to put the number 2 into the page of the special meter book. A slow process, but he follows on with the 5, 5, 6, and 1 that Conor reads out. “It tells us how much gas we’re using,” explains Kyle.
As he does, the wheel on the meter flies around for a few seconds as Mary runs the hot tap in the kitchen during preparation of lunches for the youngsters after their long morning. Inside, two more young pupils want to demonstrate how the Food Monster digests all their waste grub.
Meanwhile, the class’s two Megans — MacSweeney and Coleman — have brought a little container of leftover crumbs for Mary in the kitchen to feed the Food Monster.
This is the name the staff have given to the food waste disposer under the kitchen sink. It shreds up food pieces fed into it and flushes it off into the sewerage drain. “It’s not suitable to compost here, we’re conscious of having the small kids out around the back, so we just use the Food Monster instead,” says principal Claire Devaney.
“He’ll eat practically anything, the only thing he doesn’t like is banana skins.”
Back in the classroom, Kyle points out the box the class has for collecting used batteries, which they use to power some of their toys. Olga asks what they have at home with batteries in them.
One suggests the hoover at home is battery-powered and another girl says she has a walkie-talkie with batteries in it.
As someone who sees the problems caused by litter and waste in his everyday job, Jim Donnelly is delighted with the work going on at Bright Sparks.
“To get an education in recycling at this age is so important. Because if they learn it this early, they grow up with it and it’s going to stay with them,” says the litter and traffic warden for Mitchelstown.
“Litter is a mindset. It’s something that we could clean up overnight if we decided to. But they say that littering habits starts when a child is very young, if they see their parents just throwing stuff.”
In his first few years, he issued about 30 fines a year for littering, but that has fallen to about eight by last year.
“There’s definitely been an improvement, but the bigger end of my job is the illegal dumping.”
The idea of teaching children is that the message filters back to the older generations. “It’s great to see what they’re doing here, and the process continues on then in the other schools.”
In each room, right down to the toddler groups, there are separate bins for paper and cardboard, and for waste — mostly filled with the tissues that are a must-have around so many runny noses and teary eyes.
The naíonra Irish-language playgroup takes place in the mornings, with another one in the afternoon, and there are always 10 children in the room. Teacher Pamela Kent explains that it’s very informal, and they pick up a cúpla focal through the play and games,
“I might say ‘seasaigí’, to stand up, or ‘ná bí ag rith’. It’s gas then when you hear them talk to each other, they’d be telling each other the things I tell them.”
Thomas Murphy introduces himself as “Thomas Train” because they each have a symbol.
Asked by Pamela what they recycle, Saoirse Barrett says: “We recycle the tissues into the blue bin,” and she points at the bin, suitably labelled in Irish as “bosca brúscair”.
And what about the paper and the cardboard?
“Over there,” she says, pointing to the “bosca athcúrsáil”.
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