Colegiul de Industrie Alimentară "Elena Doamna"

A small step for us, an important step for the community – Eco behaviour

We are students of “Elena Doamna” Food Industry College from Galati and we have met while doing volunteering activities held in the school. Within the framework of the Eco-school program, we have participated to ecological activities proposed by the school for approximately 3 years and thus, we have been able to form  an objective opinion about what happens in the surrounding reality:

• Students are involved only partially in the educational activities despite learning about the importance of resources and their limited character, about global warming or about how to prevent the  accumulation of wastes and how to collect selectively;
• The town’s inhabitants, although they benefit from specially designed spaces designed for waste collection in their neighborhoods,do not use them correctly or just do not know of their existence.

These problems will increase in the future:

• Students will not be ready for a society about which we learn that must be durable;
• Citizens who do not contribute to the general wealth of the city, either out of carelessness, or out of lack of absence information ;
• An environment  that is not beneficial to our health;

Within this context, we thought that we could be useful to the others and so we decided to participate in a project with the overall theme ‘’Earth- enjoy it, but leave some for later’’ which aims at educating us all in the spirit of promoting the principles of sustainable development - a  theory which we must accept and insert in all our activities.

The project  involves conducting activities both internally and externally

Internally, in the school we organize the debate entitled “Terra: Our present and future’’; we supervise the activities taking place during the selective waste collection campaign and participate to the  workshops during which  the waste from our community (paper, plastic,wood objects, etc.) are turned into objects with different uses; we prepare the exhibition ‘’Be an artist by recycling ‘’ that will select and reward the most successful  works of art.

Externally, our colleagues, organized in teams and endowed with the necessary materials (leaflets and flyers)propose themselves to offer the  citizens of our city the information that we learn in school and we consider them useful as the minimum of measures that each of us can take to have a better life in a city that we want to be ecological and competing with the most beautiful cities of Europe.

The materials will promote: individual health care, respect for the city’s cleanliness, the efficient use of resource by avoiding wastage, the involvement in the diminishing the effects of greenhouse gases.

We want the final result of our research to be positive:

• More of our classmates should feel motivated to make simple but useful gestures.
• Citizens with high civic spirit
• A community that, by producing and consuming in a durable way, will not owe future generations.

Studends:  -       Badea Florin, 17 years old

-          Stănescu Albert, 16 years old

School: Colegiul de Industrie Alimentară “Elena Doamna” Galaţi

Country: Romania

Coordinating teacher: Mariana Stanciu

Materials published on the school’s website: www.elenadoamna.ro