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At Rantzausminde School, during the school years 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 we have participated in the Erasmus + project “Less Plastic, More Future”.
In the project, we have collaborated with schools from Italy, Germany, France and Spain.
The aim of the project has been to involve the students in a number of inclusive service learning activities, which have been intended to bring changes not only in the participants' habits, but also in social, cultural and ethical respects.
Furthermore, we have had a desire to make students aware of their role as European citizens through the development of their intercultural competencies.
The project has partly consisted of a number of joint activities with the other participating countries, but in addition we at Rantzausminde School have also worked with our own service learning projects, which have had the aim to create a focus on reducing plastic and plastic waste in students' daily lives and in the local community.
At Rantzausminde School, it has mainly been students from the world line who have been involved in the project, but sometimes we have also involved students from other classes - this mainly when the focus has been garbage collection since more involved students means more collected garbage.
How have we done? Which service learning activities have we created?
The bag project
We called our first service learning project the "bag project." The project was part of the teaching in the subject "praksis faglighed".
The purpose of the project was to reduce the number of plastic bags that are handed out in connection with the ordinary consumer's grocery purchases in the local supermarket.
Initially, the students wrote an information letter to all households in the local area. The purpose of the letter was to collect as much recyclable material as possible. The students searched for old shirts, tablecloths, curtains and other leftovers.
The local community was extremely cooperative and helpful, and we were able to collect many bags of fabric. Then the students went to the sewing machines and started producing bags which they later handed over to the local supermarket.
Garbage collection in 2021 and 2022
Every year, the school's environmental council arranges a waste collection in the local area. This has also been the case in both 2021 and 2022. The Environmental Council’s intention has been to collect as much waste as possible and therefore many of the school's classes have participated in the day.
In connection with the school's waste collection, the world line has had a special focus on collecting plastic and has made sure to sort the plastic into the right fractions.
World Clean Up day - September 18th 2021
In the period leading up to the annual “World Clean Up Day”, students in science class worked with various experiments on degradation time for different materials in nature. Through teacher presentations, various science experiments, the students became aware of the degradation time and the harmful effect on different materials in nature.
As a conclusion to this topic, the world line participated in World Clean Up Day in September 2021 but with the special focus on collecting face masks, as face masks at that time had become a regular part of Danes' everyday life, for instance they were mandatory in public transport at that time.
Facemasks are made of plastic, which can remain in the environment for centuries. Over time it will be fragmented into smaller pieces, which can affect both the environment, the wildlife and our own health. Among other things, through our drinking water - which is why we found it extremely relevant to collect as many facemasks as possible to try to clarify how large a proportion of our waste facemasks at that time constituted.
Visit to the local recycling center
What happens to the collected plastic?
Why has Svendborg municipality chosen not to include a space for plastic in the newly purchased waste bins for all households in the municipality? Why is there such a big difference in how the various Danish municipalities handle the collected plastic?
The latest figures from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency show that 42 percent of the plastic packaging was collected for recycling in 2017. In 2014, the figure was 31%. The Danes have therefore generally become much better at sorting waste - including plastic.
The goal in Denmark is to recycle 50 percent of all plastic packaging by 2025.In November 2021, we went on a company visit to the local recycling station to follow the waste's path from citizen to plant and to seek answers to some of our questions.
Visit to the local supermarket to find out more about the Danish “pant-system”
In Denmark, we have for many years been known for having an expanded mortgage system. This system intends to motivate manufacturers to reduce their material consumption and to design more circular packaging.
There has long been a deposit on bottles and in recent years the deposit scheme has been expanded to also include cans, glasses, plastic bottles and more.
One of “Less Plastic, More Future”'s goals has been to reduce the use of plastic partly in the students' own everyday lives but hopefully also in the local community so therefore in November 2021 we visited the local use to investigate what happens with the bottles, the glasses, the cans after we have delivered them back to the supermarket.
The school's recycling system - focus on plastic waste
In the autumn of 2021, the world line established a local plastic collection at Rantzausminde School. Every day, the school receives a large amount of plastic in the form of packaging from school meals. We set up collection containers in all classrooms for the different types of plastic - mainly soft and hard plastic.
However, we quickly realized that our great work in collecting and sorting the plastic could not be supported by the local sorting system, as the municipality of Svendborg does not divide the plastic into fractions, and we unfortunately experienced that our different types of collected plastic ended up in the same container . So due to this new knowledge we stopped sorting and are waiting for the municipality as a whole to develop a better system for collecting plastic.
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