Visibility of eTwinning Projects Groups July 2019 Newsletter Newsletter 9 | Page 93

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2019 Newsletter
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Teaching E-waste management based on the
17 Sustainable Development Goals
by Iva Naranđa and Georgia Lascaris
Introduction
In this article the authors of the eTwinning project
“Electronic Waste Around Us”
(https://twinspace.etwinning.net/71973/home)
describe the project in its entirety, covering the
main activities of all project partners. The project
started in September 2018, and activities lasted
until June 2019. The aim of the project was to draw
attention to a comprehensive view of the social,
environmental and economic aspects of electronic
waste based on the 17 Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) and convince our students to engage
in further environmentally conscious behaviours.
Sustainable development is crucial as it involves
satisfying the needs of the present population
without endangering the capability of the future
population. Globalization and technological
advancements have led to a boom of the electrical
and electronic industries and therefore to a very
significant increase of e-waste with a negative
impact on people’s well-being and the environment.
Therefore it’s very important to teach e-waste
management at schools to help our students
develop skills and attitudes of active citizenship. In
this project, we especially considered the
possibilities of reducing, reusing and recycling e-
waste.
The main project activities
At the beginning of the project, the partners
presented themselves in various ways. We used
Google Maps to show our locations and Padlet for all
other materials used to present teachers and
schools.
The e-waste collection action at school in a co-
operation with a local company, as well as the
creation of New Year greeting cards using e-waste,
were the most important actions of this project,
inviting the students and the whole school
community to take an active part in the e-waste
recycling process. A recycle corner was created in
each school with specific e-waste recycle bins
(made by students or placed by local non-profit
environmental companies) and they were
challenged to fill them up. The students, using
experiential learning activities, were asked to
disassemble e-waste objects (keyboards, old
computers, mouses), keep the useful parts, create
art with some of those elements (our Christmas
cards) and then, correctly recycle the rest.
We marked the International E-waste Day by
creating a few collaborative activities. In fact, it was
the first International E-waste Day in the world and
we are proud to be a part of it. Teachers
collaborated and prepared a poster, an online
questionnaire for students, LearningApps games
and started a shared presentation with the picture
dictionary. We used this poster in our eTwinning
corners at schools and on school websites to draw
attention to the event and our project.
The next activity was our participation in the
European Week for Waste Reduction. We used
Padlet to present our work and we created the
eTwinning Live Event. Since then, we have been
working on reducing the amount of various waste in
our local community, collaborating with the
ecological groups of our schools or with
environment non-profit companies.
Professional lectures at schools help students
realize that e-waste is a global problem in need of
solutions and that reducing and reusing electronics
and electrical materials are as important as
recycling them.
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