Welcome everybody! This is a new YEP forum about Recycling and Social issues. What does that mean??? It means that this is the perfect place to discuss and share ideas that will allows us to understand and learn how social and environmental problems are related.

On this first post I would like to share with you a brief description of the project I have started with  Argentinean Yeps in Buenos Aires:

Social-environmental project that aims to solve 3 problems of Argentinean society. 1) Awareness about social inequality and the environment, 2) Teach and give young kids the opportunity to recycle. 3) Help to integrate families from marginal communities and improve their opportunities in life.

We divided our project in two parts:

A) Starting a working group/team that consists of teachers, a Judge, young adults and parents interested in raising social and environmental awareness. This working group aims to create an Activity Program to teach kids the importance of recycling and taking care of the environment. Get them involved with activities. Get them used to divide their waste on separate baskets. We want kids to feel part of this project, not to look at it like an obligation, because when you do something just because you are told to do it, it loses its real value.

B) Get Schools in our area to donate their wastes to a Recycling Cooperative. This Recycling Cooperative  is runned by persons from marginal neighborhoods who will pick up, divide and sell the recycling taking 100% of the profit for themselves. In this we aim to fight poverty and teach young kids how to do something useful out of what you thought you couldn’t use anymore. Most of the persons that work on this cooperative have no education at all, no health care, and no social number. This project will help them to make a living and improve their opportunities in life. We consider this project very interesting because is joins 2 different parts of Argentinean society. In this project people from middle/high classes work together with the most unfortunate.

It would be very interesting if you could share with us on this forum how recycling takes in your community!

Martin

my area here, so need more recycling bins. there are some but they are general recycling bins (which means you jus throw all the stuff you want to recycle into that one bin.) this actually defeats the purpose cause it is not separating the waste. And the residents need to start having the habit of separting their waste and not just dump all rubbish into the chute in their home. ( the single chute at home was included since the past but there was a certain purpose for it, with the main reason being lack of land space) but now that we have advanced, these old ways should start giving way to new ones. Well, i am trying to educate my neighbours. Hope the message of separating the waste starts to spread. It was wonderful to have the 'separating our waste' habit and opportunity when we were at camp. (: [i so didnt know that only plastic bottles can be recycled. any other plastic objects can be recycled? thanks.]

Li, I don't know any more plastic objects except Pet bottles to recycle. The best thing you can do with plastic is: Avoid using it =) ! Have a look at the Forum discussion "Plastic", Topic "Plastic in your blood ->GROP-Rules" (Later Post) . There we search rules how we can avoid plastic in our daily life. maybe you have any adds?

=)

I think that in Poland there is a very good solution for recycling. In most cities  we have special bins for glass, paper, plastic bottles and other. The only possible problem may be the fact that these bins are outside and sometimes people need to walk a little bit to recycle but I guess it will not discourage people cause these bins are always full when I see them :) So I'm very happy about the situation in Poland :)

When it comes to school we also have there special bins for recycling and more and more people use them :)

But why do you only recycle plastic bottles in Switzerland. I am really wondering about it. Actually it would be about the chemical structure of the plastic not about its shape. And not only bottles are made from PET, there are plenty other objects.

Seen from the chemical side most plastic objects can be recycled. And in Germany for example, you don't separate between PETbottle and plastic foil, both can be recycled!

Hi, im new to the site but loving it.

In my country we have public recycling bins aswell, but they are definetally not being used as well as they could be. the bins are teated dissrespectfully, and often normal rubish is thrown into the bins causing a lot more trouble for the people who do the recycling. I feel that Europeans and americans are more motivated to do their part and recycle (I know this is a generalisation) whereas south africans have not yet enterd into a stated of mind where recycling is the normal and necessary thing to do. I believe that in my country education and motivation are the two main things that would improve our environmental impact and lead to people recycling more and more often.

We need people to buy into recycling, not just do it because they are told to.

Hi, im new to the site but loving it.

In my country we have public recycling bins aswell, but they are definetally not being used as well as they could be. the bins are teated dissrespectfully, and often normal rubish is thrown into the bins causing a lot more trouble for the people who do the recycling. I feel that Europeans and americans are more motivated to do their part and recycle (I know this is a generalisation) whereas south africans have not yet enterd into a stated of mind where recycling is the normal and necessary thing to do. I believe that in my country education and motivation are the two main things that would improve our environmental impact and lead to people recycling more and more often.

We need people to buy into recycling, not just do it because they are told to.