How Europe will save the world!

Global warming is a threat for our country but also for the whole world. Our mission, as teachers and citizens is to awake awareness in our students and show them how it can benefit them.

 

First, concerning energy savings, students must learn about the different sources of energy, their costs and the impact on our planet. They will learn where our energy comes from. Then they can easily raise questions about their own today behaviours as regard energy spending, whether at school or at home. For example, at school, they always keep the doors leading outside wide open at all times, they complain about the cold whereas they only wear T-shirts. At home, they leave the light on in rooms they are not using, or families often overheat their houses to improve their well-being. Students are often driven to school whereas they could simply walk or cycle. We want our students to become aware that they should change their habits to contribute, at their own level, to the saving of energy.

 

Our school has arranged selective sorting at every level: in classrooms there is a bin for papers and one for common waste.

In the school restaurant, pupils are asked to sort out packing, fruit and vegetable waste, paper napkins and wasted bread.

Unfortunately, in the end, all the garbage goes into the same container because students make too many mistakes, they don’t see the point of doing it, they are careless. They sometimes don’t bother to put their papers in the bin, and when they see some, they just step over or kick them aside. Moreover, even if bins are available, the playground is always littered by waste (papers, packings, chewing-gums…). As our area is very windy, waste is blown about and ends up miles away in fields or in the nearby river which flows directly into the Mediterranean Sea which is the most polluted sea in the world.

 

Finally, waste of paper also comes from the photocopies made by teachers and given to students. Even if teachers try to limit them, students are here again very careless about them, often losing them and asking for replacement. Teachers use software to inform their students about their homework, but are confronted with many problems: first, in the nearby villages, the internet connection is very poor; then, a lot of students are too much used to photocopies to accept online homework without printing them. Even if most of them know what paper is made from, they need to understand the impact of producing paper on the planet, how the use of ICT can help reducing it.

 

By working with our partners, Greece, Poland, Portugal and Germany, they will be able to compare their behaviours to the others’ as regards energy saving and waste and work together, thanks to an exchange of good practices, to implement good ideas in their own school and to make sure behaviours will change. They can find a way to convince their fellow schoolmates and the teachers into changing their habits, they can also make their parents put in practise good gestures and thus become in turn future eco-citizens.