We are delighted to share a blog written by student Duru Polat from Hisar School, 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.
We are creating a movement for everyone to be a part of the solution.
Project Overview
As a group that is planning to spread awareness about the usage of plastic and the damage it leaves in our environment we are working hard to create a user friendly project for our community. Me and my teammates are all really concerned about this issue and the disasters it caused in our environment so we wanted to do our best and help as much as we could. We also figured out that most households don’t recycle their plastic waste in our survey and empathetic research. We want to push others and give them an opportunity to recycle their plastic waste. Our main goal is to create an online platform where our customers plastic waste at home will be recycled into fabric with the help of textile factories. They will gain points every time they send us plastic to recycle. The fabric made from plastic will be turned into clothing attire and our customers will have the opportunity to shop for free with the points they earned by recycling plastic. Every time they buy a product, the same product will be sent to a student in East Turkey. From this process both the customers, the schools especially in East Turkey and most importantly our environment will benefit.
Our Journey
As a group, we have all improved ourselves and developed new skills while working towards bringing our project to life. While planning our future steps and reaching out to companies to get information, we improved our management and communication skills. In addition, every member took an online course in a different area such as finance, adobe xd and adobe illustrator to develop new skills that will make the future steps easier. We learned that we influence and inspire each other to improve ourselves with our different skills and interests. Although we faced minor communication issues we solved these problems by talking through. Our main challenge right now is that our project can be too complicated to control since it has several aims and parts that are slightly unrelated. The plastic will go through many operations before being sold as clothing attire and sent to students in East Turkey. Tracking the plastic might be challenging for us since it will require us to keep in touch with different factories. We plan on overcoming this challenge with a online tracking system.
The Next Chapter
Our future plans for this project are to get in touch with the factories, get more attention on our project, find someone to help work on the coding of our app and help raise awareness in real life. Working with the factories will help turn the plastic received by factories into fabric that’ll be used to make clothing, which will be the reward for customers. By the use of social media platforms we will soon be able to get our project across to people from all across the country, we hope to reach people with our advertisement and online platforms. By creating brochures and posters, we will be able to raise awareness in our own community as well as online platforms. Even though our group has experience with coding, finding someone who is more experienced and will help bring our ideas to life, will help us save time while still creating what we have come up with in our heads. Our app will make it easier for people to see their progress and track their plastic and end product.
Social Media Channels
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.
