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In addition, the school has servery and dining hall were refurbished over the summer holidays, the latter also extended to add an further 100 seats to allow more students to eat inside and cut the overall need for food packaging.

Those that do opt to take their food and drinks away now have the option of purchasing HCL’s homemade food and Rainforest Alliance certified coffees in new takeaway packaging supplied by Vegware, which is fully compostable.

Frances Manning, headteacher at Hitchin Girls School, said: "I have been increasingly aware of the impact of plastics on the environment and as a result have been keen to reduce our usage.

“When we discussed this at school I discovered that our School Council had also raised this as an issue that they would like to address.

“We soon realised it was very straight forward to introduce compostable packaging and Vegware and HCL have been very proactive and accommodating in what we wanted to achieve, so it was easier than we expected.”

“Waste has such a big impact on the environment, and schools can really make a difference being such large organisations,” said Ian Hamilton, chief executive of HCL.

“We are proud to be supporting a fantastic initiative to make school meal packaging more sustainable.”