We are delighted to share a blog written by student Mirel, from Hisar School, who is part of team Planeteers delivering a Global Goals project for the 2020-21 GSL Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community.
Understanding the importance of recycling and reusing has never been this much important and we’ve become aware of this even more during a global pandemic which made us have different points of view for the world, realize the global consequences of our actions and appreciate what we have.
Project Summary
Our goal in this project is to create awareness about recycling all types of recyclable wastes and medical wastes, increasing the recycling skills of our country, Turkey. At the same time, we are working on finding the best possible way of recycling habits to integrate into our lives. This way we were able to spread the importance of recycling for our world and continue recycling lifelong while contributing to nature. In our project we aren’t only working on recycling normal wastes, we are also working on the medical wastes emerging with the pandemic period we are living in. It is a great danger for our world if the masks, which are the most used medical waste, are not thrown into the correct waste bins.
Close to 1 million disposable masks are used daily in Turkey and are polluting our environment when they are thrown to the wrong place. There are many people who aren’t aware of the consequences that could happen if we fail at recycling medical wastes correctly. To avoid this global issue we organized different works in this development project. It was our experience as a group to research and learn the facts about this topic before starting this project. We made a social media account, posters, and events as a group for the development of this project.
The Journey
By participating in the GSL Global Goals Competition, we realized that there are actually ways to solve issues that have become world troubles. Thanks to this contest, we understood that unity and cooperation can bring a solution to every problem and every world issue. As our project progressed, we learned and thus we had the chance to explain the importance of our project to other people in a more useful way. This journey definitely changed our perspective on the world’s problems and brought out feelings of empathy and sensitivity. We think that some of the problems we experienced while advancing our project will continue in the future. However, we do not think these problems are insurmountable.
If we can reach more people with our project and have everybody included to take action, then we can overcome this world issue. Thanks to the unity and strong friendship of our team, we can solve any problem. We think our biggest challenge that we had to overcome was reaching out to people during these quarantine days. It was thought to make others participate and take us seriously while we developed our project. We believe we have reached out to a good number of people for now and we are still working on it. The best is yet to come. We are happy and proud to make a difference in the world while reaching out to a lot of people. Every little help makes a big difference to our future to put a big smile on.
The Next Chapter
Yes, we definitely recommend that our peers and other people participate in projects like this or even create their own projects. It is very important to create and spread awareness about global issues. When a person becomes responsive, reactive, they also take action and teach others, so others become conscious. Our suggestions for our peers are to raise awareness as much as they can and never give up trying to make a change for our future. We believe that we can solve every problem easily with the help of everyone. The project that we are developing is an opportunity for others to contribute to us and continue the journey with their own developed projects. In this way, they would be able to improve their knowledge and we would be able to spread our project to more people.
