Recycling can be a real pain. When we went away for 10 days last summer, I asked my eight-year-old - chief child in charge of recycling - to empty the food bin. Fast forward 10 days and we returned to find that he thought I’d said “empty the cardboard recycling”. To be greeted with the unemptied food bin, with its freshly fermented liquid fizzing at the bottom, was a shock to the senses. What a welcome back!

Having dealt with that, I sat down with a coffee, read through the mail and caught up with things. Something stood out in the pile; a school communication: “Do not send your child to school with single-use plastic bottles, as we don’t want to pollute the planet.”

My predicament with that instruction is threefold. First, the larger reusable bottles leak too often and I don’t want to ruin his bag and books. Second, bottles frequently go missing - the planet has at least five of his multi-use water bottles lurking somewhere. Third, when I buy a plastic bottle of water, it is refilled many times, then recycled.

The missive made me wonder about the variations in schools’ recycling policies. Surely all paper, all plastic and all food is recycled in these seats of learning, in which we are all no doubt equally worried about closing attainment gaps and saving the planet? But from my research, I’m not convinced David Attenborough would be too pleased with the general picture here in Scotland; whatever we’re doing with attainment gaps, we are not doing a great job when it comes to caring for the planet.

Rubbish education

One thing is certain: every school has an “eco group”. These can be student-led, with pupil councils stating all the environmental actions one can undertake as a pupil, or they may be staff groups at collegiate level, filling in the wording for the annual school development plan. But another thing is for sure: not everyone is being as environmentally active as they could be.

I did a straw poll before writing this, and it seems that about a quarter of schools do no recycling at all. Meanwhile, half of schools expect pupils to recycle the paper for them. The situation varies dramatically from school to school; excellent practice in one involves large recycling bins being placed in the corridor so pupils can just walk a few yards outside their classroom to pop their detritus in the bin, for example.

However, another school reported the dutiful separation of rubbish into different bins, only to discover that the cleaners and caretakers disposed of all the waste in the one general bin in the car park. The staff and pupils may have morally been recycling but the waste was still going to landfill.

I would argue that this was a better school for the wellbeing of the planet than some, though, as pupils are learning to recycle - a skill that is possibly more important than we currently realise. My heart sinks, though, at the thought of the day that those poor, conscientious kids discover what their school does with the waste.

Another concern is the potential health and safety issue of those schools that expect pupils to go into the car park or the bin sheds at the back of the school in unsupervised areas. Half of recycling is done by the pupils and most schools seem not to have an indoor recycling point. Is that a cost saving? Is it because pupils love it? Is it because staff love giving that job to a pupil they want to get out of their hair for a few minutes?

Mixed bag

One teacher said that no food or plastic was recycled in her school. All the lunch-hall leftovers got scraped into big bins along with the other lunchtime waste, including cans, bottles and polystyrene packaging. Since hearing this, I have approached colleagues in various authorities. I am yet to find one that recycles food, even though many (most?) authorities have food-recycling caddies and boxes for homes. And very few have any policy on plastics and cans.

With paper recycling, we’re all terrified we’ll make a wrong call. I don’t want to find wee Jimmy’s report card drifting around the car park because I personally mixed up my shredding and recycling - the sort of thing we have to think about in our data-protection world. Teachers are terrified that wee Jimmy’s report card is wafting around in the wind because they put a bothersome child out to do the recycling, only to find the child mostly missed the bin. Wee Jimmy may have just posted his report card out of the corridor window, but I may never know for sure, nor will any compliance officer who visits.

The cost of proper recycling may seem prohibitive in this world where finances are eternally ripped from schools and teachers are asked to do more with less, but is that really an excuse? What sort of future leaders, parents, artists and dreamers are we creating if we blithely show pupils that food, plastic, cans and all the other junk goes in one bin? If they don’t use the recycling bins properly, we adults are to blame. Harsh? Well, if they can’t spell, read, count or play, whose fault is that?

So, every time a plastic bottle washes up on the beach, we should ask ourselves this: was a poor education policy to blame?

Eddie White is a maths teacher in East Lothian