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In the first week of January, I arranged a collection of Christmas cards from staff and students at KES. I had a 'target' of 10 000 cards and ended up with 8 large boxes packed with cards. I estimated a total of around 100 people's worth of cards had been collected.

Taking an average journey of around 2 miles to the nearest recycling centre: several supermarkets and other places offered a service, I then went online to a carbon production calculator. This meant that I saved around 30 pounds of carbon from being pumped into the atmosphere.

If you don't, you should be. Over 200 million inkjet cartridges are binned each year in Western Europe, and they are worth £1 each to charity.

They also accept mobile phones. There are an estimated 75 million old mobile phones lying in cupboards and drawers in the UK alone. These can be worth up to £15 for the charity.

If you have either, you need to head to THIS WEBSITE to get an envelope and start recycling.

You can also neutralise your carbon by checking into FUTURE FORESTS website. For £150 you can carbon neutralise yourself by having 15 trees planted in a forest to balance out the CO2 your activities produce during the year.

Also received a copy this week of a Strategy for Sustainable Development produced by the Learning and Skills Council.

Another website contact / phone number is that of the CARBON TRUST. You may have seen their advert with Oppenheimer. They very promptly sent a pack of stickers to attach to light switches and posters to put near to windows which may well be left open, computers which may be switched on all day and not used and other electrical devices.

Recently had a presentation by Nell Seal about the BROAD FUTURES project which runs in Norfolk. The locational context is / are the Norfolk Broads. The aim of the project is to support teachers with ESD. For more information on the project, try the ESINET link here and then click on 'BROAD FUTURES'. There are a number of resources available. At the moment these are largely for Key Stage 2, by the end of 2005 there will be some secondary resources. There are some INFORMATION SHEETS. Some useful resources on Ecological Footprinting can be found HERE.

For any information on recycling and waste check out WASTE ONLINE. WASTE WATCH magazine.

The UN has designated 2005-2014 as the DECADE for Education for Sustainable Development.

The WWF have been very busy and have opened a LEARNING FOR SUSTAINABILITY area of their website. It has NEWS, ACTIVITIES, ACTION FOR SCHOOLS, BOOKSHOP, PUPIL DEBATES AND RESOURCE BANK amongst other things.

ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINTING

Daniel Raven Ellison of West Heath School in Berkshire has set up a great site which will have a QCA / RGS-IBG endorsed SoW. He is also a consultant on a fab new RGS mini-site on Education for Sustainable Development which now includes a rather splendid Scheme of Work.

I was privileged to see Daniel's Teacher to Teacher session at the 2005 GA Conference. He went through several areas which could assist in the teaching of these areas, and gave me a rather nice booklet on foot-printing in London.

JENGA is a good game for using to teach about sustainability. Can't keep taking blocks from the bottom without the tower falling over at some point. Should be able to pick up a cheap version of it in your local factory shop.

Need to CALCULATE their footprint. Can then ACTION PLAN how they are going to reduce it. Could also do some data handling with the information that they produce about their individual footprints.

Can also scale it up. If each pupil has an average footprint of: a particular amount, then can plot how big that is on a map. Remember that 1 hectare is 100m x 100m - this equates to one section of a grid square on an OS map which is easy enough to measure.

This can then be worked out for the particular CLASS, then the SCHOOL, then the COMMUNITY / TOWN / VILLAGE where the school is located.

He is also involved in a project to develop educational resources around the future development of SAO TOME & PRINCIPE

http://www.saotome-e-principe.org/Teaching%20about%20Sao%20Tome%20and%20Principe.html - is a CMAP of this.

CMAP is a useful site for producing OPEN SOURCE versions of concept maps, which can then be added to by anyone who wants to - more to come on these on the COLLABORATION page.

Materials used in Daniel's presentation at the GA Conference are available to download from the GA WEBSITE.

Check out an organisation called BEST FOOT FORWARD, who have produced an ecological accounting report of LONDON called CITY LIMITS. Try the NEW SCIENTIST's quiz to assess how big your footprint is.

Coming soon: an EXCEL version of the Footprinting Quiz for use with students.

Could also consider how to make activities CARBON NEUTRAL: can pay to have trees planted to 'carbon neutralise' journeys that they make, or activities they have taken part in...

Could also aim to introduce an Eco / Environmental committee onto the school council.

There are a number of sites which offer the chance to create a CARBON NEUTRAL EXISTENCE. A must visit site is the FUTURE FORESTS Carbon Calculator, which works out how to reduce your carbon in 3 categories:

and suggests how many trees you need to plant to neutralise the carbon you created.

The WWF Lifelines magazine for Summer 2005 gave more information on FOOTPRINTING.

We are using up the Earth's resources at a rate 20% faster than they can be replenished.

The CO2 site has a section called CLIMATE CARE. This allows you to work out and OFFSET the Carbon dioxide emissions that are the result of your daily activities and travelling. The Times is apparently using these offsets whenever it sends a travel reporter round the world. It is aiming to be the first 'climate neutral' travel section. It send a report to The Gambia for example, and the cost to offset their reporter's share of the effects of that flight cost £14.43.

You can OFFSET the CO2 produced by one individual in a year for around £75. There are other options available to offset different activities, or aspects of your life.

Appearing here will be a list of case studies of sustainable projects relating to housing, industrial production, tourism, food and all other aspects...

This is a project running in Cornwall, which looks to be an excellent example: CoaST is the Cornwall Sustainable Tourism Project. It offers a range of services to its members.

This ensures that food is from a sustainable source, and uses a blue fish tick logo.

This uses the tick tree symbol to ensure that wood used in products is from a sustainable source.