PUPILS and staff at St Ives School in Haslemere dressed to impress for the start of National Tree Week.

The week-long celebration marks the start of the winter tree-planting season and everyone wore green in a show of solidarity.

St Ives School has committed to learning more about the environmental issues facing the world and is working hard to become an international Green Flag Award eco-school.

Supporting National Tree Week is one of several initiatives the school has held. Other events have included a ‘green festival’, and pupils are making eco bricks from their non-recyclable plastic.

An eco brick is a plastic bottle filled with used plastic that can’t be recycled. The bottles are packed to a high density to create reusable building blocks and are being used all over the world to make various structures.

Year 4 pupils also held a whole school assembly explaining the importance of trees and the water cycle, and how it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure there is enough water and oxygen to go around.

Each pupil wearing green donated £1 to Just One Tree, a non-profit organisation that aims to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through reforestation.

The charity works with established reforestation partners who concentrate their planting in areas severely affected by mass deforestation.

It targets the sites that will have the greatest effect in combating global warming and helping to alleviate extreme poverty within impacted communities, through training, education and employment.

For every pound raised, the charity plants a tree.

*For more information on the Just One Tree initiative, visit www.justonetree.life