Lesson number one: reduction!

by Valentina Tibaldi

The bell is ringing, it’s time for waste reduction. In the Comprehensive School G.B. Monteggia in Laveno Mombello, the reflection on waste reduction includes concrete actions aiming to educate young people to have a more reasoned relationship with… their garbage!

Along with the EWWR (European Week for Waste Reduction) style, the underlying belief is that preventing an overproduction of waste is easier than we think: we just need common sense and the right amount of creativity. 

Which snack generates less waste? The school managed to create a well-structured educational project starting from daily experience and ordinary questions like this. First of all, the project is based on a competition, where students have to use their skills to find the best way of approaching the issue of waste reduction. In order to win an award made of papier-mâché and other recycled materials, they are going to become: skilled communicators thinking up effective claims and coordinate graphic for the message they want to deliver; wise strategists drawing up a list of useful actions to reduce waste production; practiced craftsman designing different containers in order to make a proper separate collection of rubbish; estrous artists finding innovative usages to potential garbage.

But this is not the end. In fact, if reducing our own waste is easy, finding new ways of reducing it can be even funny: from November, 19th to 23rd, severe guardians of trashcans will be controlling their classmates’ behaviors, while artistic and informative exhibitions about environment sustainability will be filling the halls of the school.
In these terms, the event crosses scholastic borders, aiming to become a permanent project, extended to pupils’ families. With a unique purpose: transmitting to adults that same consciousness young people learn and experience at school.

Manuela Trevisan, teacher and promoter of the project together with Alessandra Annoni and Paola Zarini, claims that: “this project makes students feel real protagonists and part of a bigger system. United we stand: if all of us take even a small step in the right direction, then we can do many great things”.

In this way, European Week for Waste Reduction becomes what it has always meant to be: a Month, a Year, a Lifestyle.