It is easy being green

The problem with going green, I’m told, is that it often means spending a great deal of money on lots of equipment that could at any moment be rendered obsolete. When it comes to renewable energy, scepticism abounds. But the outcome of this cynicism is that our efforts to be greener have been incremental at best, and symbolic at worst. Just before I left school seven years ago we were told that all bedrooms were to be fitted with low-energy light bulbs. The school would reduce its carbon footprint a trifle, while also saving a bit of money (or vice versa). I remember thinking at the time that this was less an initiative than a gesture — a head-fake towards social responsibility to soothe their conscience.

The fact remains, though, that going green, really green, is still a pressing obligation that institutions can ill-afford to ignore.

What can be said, then, of a small boarding school attempting, at one stroke, to reduce its annual carbon emissions by nearly 70 per cent, and all without spending a penny? I speak of St Mary’s Shaftes-bury, a Catholic girls’ school in 55 acres of Wiltshire which this summer set in motion the most thorough green initiative ever attempted by an independent British school.

Its transformation will be extreme, to say the least. The main building and estate of St Mary’s date back to the 1880s, and since that time very few of its energy facilities have undergone what you might call ‘diligent modernisation’. Off the grid for gas, the school has had to rely instead on oil and LPG (liquid petroleum gas) for decades. Many of its boilers were installed in the 1960s.

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All this is about to change. When the girls of St Mary’s return for the Christmas term, they’ll find themselves in one of the greenest schools in the country, its roofs replete with solar panelling and its buildings heated by a vast biomass boiler.