Each year the world generates over 2.01 billion tons of waste. Litter and waste clog our oceans, fill our streets and clutter huge areas of the planet. They cause great damage to our natural environment, wildlife, and people’s health and well-being.
Building on UNESCO’s Trash Hack Campaign and ASPnet Teacher Guide, students and teachers from ten UNESCO ASPnet schools in the Dominican Republic, Italy, Japan, the Kingdom of Bahrain, Namibia and the Republic of Korea are participating since June 2022 in the Foundation for Environmental Education’s Litter Less Campaign and Young Reporters for the Environment Competition, engaging their peers and communities to eradicate litter and waste.
Not only did the students and teachers manage to tackle real environmental challenges, but they fostered their knowledge and critical analysis of litter and waste, enhanced their communication and teamwork skills, and initiated social responsibility and leadership in their communities. Based on an impact assessment, students increased their literacy on issues related to litter and waste by more than 30%.
Leveraging competitions, social media and school-community partnerships to tackle electronic waste
One of the initiatives started as a school-wide campaign to raise awareness of e-waste and ended up catching the attention of the government and private sector. ASPnet teacher Huda Labib from the Ibn Khuldoon National School in the Kingdom of Bahrain explains: “Together with my students, we developed the Forgotten Fortune e-waste Campaign. We aim to raise awareness on the increasing issue of electronic waste and how much we could save if we were to produce and consume smarter and recycle our old electronics.” With the support of school leadership and teachers, students undertook a fact-finding mission on e-waste, including study visits to an e-waste recycling company and the Bahraini Supreme Council for the Environment, but the students did not stop there: They launched a social media campaign and competitions to raise awareness among their classmates and the broader community. They managed to collect 1.6 tons of e-waste, which is now being recycled. They also built partnerships with stakeholders from the public and private sectors, such as with Bahrain’s largest national telecommunications company to disseminate the e-waste campaign. Thanks to their efforts, the students were invited by the Minister of Oil and the Environment to discuss policies that could help to reduce e-waste in Bahrain and a national bank is adopting their campaign for sensitizing their staff on e-waste. “It has been an amazing experience for my students, my peer teachers, and myself. I am very proud of my students for taking the Campaign this far and we’re committing to continue,” explains Huda.
The issue of e-waste also prompted 12-year-old student Halah Noor to become an ardent voice for the environment: “Did you know that 60 - 90 % of the world’s e-waste is either illegally traded or discarded annually, causing the loss of materials worth nearly USD 19 billion? And did you know that e-waste produces 70% of society’s overall toxic waste? Most people don’t know what to do with their old electronics, so they end up lingering in a drawer or on a shelf for years on end.” Halah and other students are now working on establishing the “E-waste Recycling Initiative'' in collaboration with the Supreme Council for Environment and the national e-waste recycling company of Bahrain. For the Young Reporters for the Environment Competition, Halah wrote an article on the challenges and solutions to tackle e-waste that reached an audience way beyond her school community and won a UNESCO ASPnet competition: “I am very proud that my article got published in our local newspaper, the Gulf News, and I hope many people in Bahrain read it and think twice about the implications when buying a new phone or other electronic items.”
Building school alliances to curb food waste and promote responsible consumption through education
The ASPnet school Ghazi Algosaibi has focused its attention on food waste. “We started with a small Campaign and now we are working with another 70 schools to curb food waste,” explains teacher Aisha Fareed. “We are also exchanging with the Ministry of Education to widen the Campaign to the whole country. Our long-term goal is to achieve inclusion of responsible food consumption in the Ministry of Education’s environmental curriculum by 2025.”
Her 17-year-old students Jenan Jaffar, Lojain Jassim, Alaa Swaid and Zainab Jaffar developed a campaign image for the Young Reporters for the Environment competition “to showcase the root of the issue in our society that causes food waste. As shown in the picture, there is a mother in a Bahraini family who throws out excess leftovers which can’t be preserved or eaten later. […] The hands in the photo represent less fortunate people who do not have the same food accessibility as other families.” Aisha underlines that “This project comes at such an important moment following the COVID-19 pandemic. It motivates students to go outside and to actively collaborate again, especially on topics that no one necessarily thinks about but faces on a daily basis, like food waste.”
Tapping into students’ creativity to raise awareness on plastic pollution
In the Dominican Republic, Miguel Coradin, the Principal of the San José Obrero School and the students and teachers from his school focus on tackling plastic pollution: “Plastic pollution is a big problem in the Dominican Republic, and critical action is needed to keep our land and sea clean. The Litter Less Campaign activities have made a big difference to our students. The topic speaks to them. Everybody is now busily taking action: Older students are teaching younger students about the 5 Rs (Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle), our school community organizes school wide action days and the students who participated in the YRE competition are taking stance as young reporters for the environment.”
14-year-old student Wilner Perez Otañez created a Campaign image to alert to the consequences of excessive use of plastic: “Soon enough we'll all be swimming in a sea of bottles, and some will drown in it. This is a call to stop this excessive waste of plastic bottles.”
