Dear Parents and Carers,

• Welcome back everyone, I hope you have had a lovely summer holiday.
• The children have settled in well and have certainly grown over the last six weeks!
• Congratulations to Anna(P7B) and Sophie (P7C) who have had their clean air posters made into banners, we shall display them when they arrive in school.
• The Scottish Government is currently carrying out a Local Governance Review with public sector partners (until November 2018) to consider how powers, responsibilities and resources are shared across national and local spheres of government and communities in order to improve outcomes for people. Further information on this is available at https://beta.gov.scot/policies/improving-public-services/local-governance-review
• Last session, our pupils wrote to City of Edinburgh Council to ask them to reduce waste and in particular plastic. We received the following information from them and shall continue to work on this this year.

The department are currently investigating the below:

• From January 2019, Parent Pay will hold the functionality to ask parents whether they would like their child to have a carton of water with their packed lunch on a Friday, this will reduce the waste if not required.
• Any savings from not providing water will be re-invested into replacing plastic sandwich packaging with a biodegradable alternative from Vegware. 
• A new water supplier has been nominated and will launch in Schools from August 2018, replacing a traditional plastic  bottle (in Friday packed lunches) with a Tetra-Pak carton (no straw).
• Brakes (dry & frozen goods) supplier have a policy which details their approach to product packaging and the steps they are taking to reduce product packaging and plastics. https://www.brake.co.uk/media/1968/working-with-us-2016_may1.pdf
• Muller Wiseman (milk supplier) are currently working with Tetra Pak to test non-plastic straws and a campaign on correct recycling of cartons.
• School Kitchens have been given a Zero Waste Scotland pack with handy hints on reducing food waste and increasing recycling
• All of our kitchen oil is taken away for conversion into bio-diesel.

Well done to all our Community Teams who have helped share the message of reducing waste. Please help us by reducing packaging at break times too.

Have a lovely Eid on Tuesday 21 August.

If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.

Kind regards,

Carol Kyle