We are delighted to share a blog written by student Anastasia Loizidou from Evangelical Model High School of Smyrna, who is part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2019-20 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.
It’s great to see your own project fulfilled and hope it will intricate other young people, too!
Project Overview
My project is about “Innovative Business and Circular Economy”. Throughout this project, I tried to indicate the great importance of innovation, sustainable development and circular economy for business in our era. Except for those, I also wanted to show how successful business can a trend become. In order to prove all the above statements, I made a survey with a questionnaire which had 5 key questions about my project and was answered by 50 people aged 13-30. The results of the questionnaire showed exactly what I wanted to hear; most of the people supported my statements.
The reason why I chose this specific topic for my project was the financial situation and the investment climate in Greece. After 10 years of economical crisis, if an existing company or a newly-founded one want to be sustainable and make profit, it should have something special. Observing some new small firms in my town, Nea Smyrni, I understood that business with innovative ideas had the most success. One of them is the business of my school No Recycling Decoration (No.Re.De.) in which I participate. No.Re.De.’s main idea is to collect non-recycling raw materials in low cost, assemble and amend them and sell the new objects in low price but always with profit. It’s a fantastic idea both for our business, since we make profit, and the environment, since we re-use every single material without making rubbish. This is exactly the model of circular economy.
All in all, my main goal is to persuade people for the advantages of innovation and circular economy, help people adopt a new consumer behavior, show that trends and innovative ideas can become successful companies and urge on people with innovative ideas set up a company like ours. Because “Innovation and circular economy is the future!”, that’s my moto!
Our Journey
The occupation with this project made me learn new things for myself and discover skills I didn’t knew I had before. Throughout the project, I discovered that I am capable to make my own survey using my own power and means and I like so much to make a research, communicate and exchange ideas with other people and see that matters which concern me, concern other people of my age, too. Moreover, I exercised and improved my skills in English and the use of computers.
After finishing this project, I have a great challenge in front of me; make No.Re.De. not only a sustainable local business but also a huge successful and profitable business in Greece, which will show the example to every other company; “innovation and circular economy is the future!” In order to achieve this purpose, we need to promote and make our business well-known to people and inform them about our project and how does it work. In this way, we can manage to persuade them bring us useless for them objects, which will become our raw materials for the new ones. And then, we have to show them that the new objects have the same quality like every other common object with one small but also great difference; they are friendlier to the environment and help for a better and green planet that we dream of!
The Next Chapter
This project is coming to its end, but this is only the beginning for me! I like very much to be engaged with such kind of projects and I am going to search for the next theme, up to which I will make my next survey. It is a great experience to make a research about a topic that concerns you and I hope my project make people understand how important innovation and circular economy is for business and our planet. Finally, I would like to encourage every other young person with similar interests and leanings like mine to get involved and make their own survey about the topic that concerns them.
WE ARE THE NEXT GENERATION AND OUR SOCIETY AND PLANET CALL US TAKE ACTION!
The 2019-20 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2020. If you belong to one of the 700+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.
