Low carbon efforts see school get an A

A school in Northern Ireland has been awarded an A grade in its energy performance certificate assessment as a result of its low carbon initiatives.

Victoria Primary School in Ballyhalbert, County Down, is the first new school in the country to install a biomass boiler in order to cut down on carbon emissions.

According to the Dromore Leader, the school was recently rebuilt and has a variety of other environmentally-friendly features installed, including a high level of insulation and toilets that flush with rainwater.

The toilets will save almost half a million litres of water each year, according to the publication.

Keith Patrick, project manager for Grahams - the firm that designed and constructed the building - commented: "These include Northern Ireland's first stand-alone biomass boiler in a new school, very high levels of insulation, rainwater harvesting to flush toilets and photovoltaic cells to generate electricity from sunlight."

Biomass boilers are carbon neutral due to the fact that they expel the same amount of CO2 that the trees used to produce heat did when they were growing, the Energy Saving Trust maintains.