Eco-school

1. CONSEQUENCES OF

The central idea of creating our article is to transmit the consequences that food waste does and how it is created. Before reading all of our details information about it, we have to know what food waste is and what it means. Food waste often refers to food not ultimately consumed by humans that is discarded or recycled, such as plate waste (leftovers, food that have been served but not eaten), expired food, or peels and rinds considered editable. Food waste occurs for human consumption being discarded.

When does food waste happen? Does it have a specific time? The answer to this question is no, it does not happen in a determinate time. Restaurants, grocery stores or more food-production companies order more food than they need, leading to an increase of food waste every day. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day someone, from one or more of the thousands of locations in Earth, waste food. Nevertheless, it does happen the most mainly during lunch and dinner hours.

Earth has 195 countries, over 10,000 cities, 7 continents and 4 oceans. But still, where does food waste occur? Since food waste is the food that humans discard, food waste occurs all over Earth since humans live everywhere! Although food waste exists all around the globe, there are some specific locations where it occurs; 83% percent occurs at restaurants and homes. China and India are the countries that are most likely to waste more food than others because of their very populated areas. Production, manufacturing and distribution levels are the supply chain that large parts of the global food occurs before even reaching our plates.

Who causes food waste? We all know that humans are the reason that food waste exists. Still, what locations and countries that produce the most food waste?

The most likely country that produces food waste is China. The amount of food waste in China exceeds 91 million tons per year. China is one of the biggest producers of food waste on the world, although it has a very big quantity of it, it probably shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the world's most populous country.

The second country to produce the most food waste, is India. The amount of food waste for India exceeds 68 million tons per year. Much like China, India’s complete population numbers unsurprisingly result in larger amounts of uneaten food.

The third country that wastes food the most is the United States. The amount of food waste in the US exceeds 19 million tons per year. For the most powerful nation on earth, food waste is a result of being the world's largest consumer of food.

FOOD WASTE

How is the process of food waste? How does it work? Food waste can cause plenty of problems to people, the environment, and animals. The process of food waste starts by the leftovers that remain after you finish your meal. Most likely, you throw those leftovers in the trash where the dustmen collect them. After finishing the day they gather and reunite everything by leaving it on the ground, creating hills of garbage. Once the area is too full to add anything else, they add soil on top of it and leave the trash on the bottom of it, leaving it to decompose. By doing this process, the environment pollutes while waiting for the trash to decompose. Food takes 1 month to 3 years (or more) to decompose.

What is it that causes all these issues and complicated chains that many people now are trying to find a solution to? Why does food waste exist? The main reason that explains the existence of food waste is the fact that people buy too much food from restaurants, grocery stores, and much more. Without overloading your shopping cart of food, you only have what you will be able to finish without wasting any of it. Furthermore, the food becomes inedible before people can consume it for many reasons, like the food being expired, not buying the correct quantity, and many more reasons.

With all of that said, what is it that we, as kids, can do? Well, there are various intelligent ways to help with this ever growing problem that is food waste. For example, when accompanying your parents to the supermarket you can encourage them to purchase only what you will eat and also think of when these items expire. Furthermore, you can also store your leftovers in the fridge for later instead of just throwing it away. Moreover, when in the cafeteria you can ask for smaller portions and come back for seconds instead of asking for a lot and wasting food. Additionally, by reducing food waste we also respect and could also help charities/people who don’t have the possibility to eat proper meals. By helping, we could send our leftovers to volunteers that work for charities and provide food for homeless men or animals. Lastly, another effective way to reduce your food waste is by composting it!

In conclusion, food waste is a worldwide problem that affects every single one of us. We can prevent this by not overestimating how much we consume on a monthly basis. The most important thing to realise is that even by taking small steps like storing away leftovers you can still make a great difference.

-Agata, Matilde, Ginevra

Secondly, another organisation that helps us out is the Nolet Waste Wise. It is an Italian Organisation whose goal is to design, build through suppliers and market a product that offers the possibility of disposing organic waste at reduced costs, enhancing it energetically, all with a decentralised distribution of products that do not require plant permits.
Thirdly, Feeding America is one of the biggest operations in the whole world and is the most famous one of all. Its main goal is to stop hunger in America. This organisation was founded in 1979 by John van Hengel. The current CEO of this organisation is Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, she was the CEO since the first of October, 2018. Feeding America partners with food banks, food pantries, shelters and local food programs to bring food to people facing hunger.

2. HELPING CREATING A BETTER WORLD

Imagine leaving a restaurant with a huge load of food left behind on your plate. How would you feel? Imagine all those little kids, teenagers, adults that are suffering from hunger all over the world and you have so much access to food but you just waste it because you got too much food or you didn’t like it. Don’t you want to help these people out? Well, there are organisations that are doing that already.
There are so many different organisations all over the world that can help.
Firstly, one of the organisations that can help us that is located in Rome, Italy is SaveTheTaste. This organisation was created in 2022. SaveTheTaste was developed as a solution to the problem, food waste. In further detail, this organisation is a mobile platform that connects merchants that want to avoid throwing away unsold food. They do this by placing the unsold food on discount for others to buy.

Lastly, one of the last organisations we will be introducing today is the City Harvest which is an Organisation that was founded in 1982 in New York City. The organisation collects food waste, for example, leftovers from restaurants, bakeries, and cafes. Everyday the City Harvest organisation deploys 26 refrigerated trucks to pick up food from nearly 2,500 farms, restaurants, grocery stores, and manufactures.
In conclusion, we found out that many companies are helping to reduce food waste. These companies are a part of what the world should do to fight against food waste. We are part of this “program”, but compared to the world we are a very small part. We all should do something, because, as Mr. Thun, science and maths teacher of MYP1-3 in H-Farm, said the world was ruined by his generation and the current generations should aim to fix it. All of these organisations are finding lots of ways to create a new world by creating a better place.

-Matilde, Matthias

NORMAL DAY DURING ECO SCHOOL

Here in our innovative, futuristic, and wonderful Campus, we have the pleasure of presenting the eco-school day brought to you by the amazing teachers, Mr. Thun and Mr. Pitarresi. Only here for two days: from the 7th of March to the 8th.

Before we head on, you might be wondering what exactly eco school day is. Our Eco school day aims to educate the students about the impacts of what we do on the world, and encourage them to take positive action to help our planet.

But, what does an eco-school day actually consist of ? Instead of normal lessons, our amazing, dedicated teachers organised clubs that connect the subject they teach to eco friendly activities. Let's get a little peek on what those projects were like with the students!

For Art Ms. Mattiuzzo chose Batik, the students use old shirts and give them a new life by dying them in vivid colours using the (sustainable) tie dye method which all of the students loved. For our left-brain students, Math with Mr. Prokos is perfect. The students sent surveys to the school about the food waste we produce in one week and transferred the results from it onto tables and graphs on posters to be stuck near the main office. Even though Math isn’t liked by everyone, all students there seem to be enjoying themselves deeply. Music with Ms. Annalisa consists of creating a rap song all about food waste: what it is, why it’s happening, and anything else you might wonder about. This club fits anyone who uses their right-side of the brain more, it’s for everyone who likes being creative and has a wild imagination!

In conclusion, these interactive activities gave the students a great opportunity to explore the different ways to achieve ecological sustainability goals in extremely fun environments and plus they learned how to conserve food, water, electricity and much more.

——by Sole, Elisa, & Aurelio

MR. THUN’S AND MR. PITARRESI’S OPINION

Here we have Mr. Thun’s and Mr. Pitaresi’s opinion on eco school day and suggestions on how to have a greener future for new generations. As we were appalled at the amount of food waste produced by our school, we decided to do something about it. To know more we interviewed the dream duo of Mr. Thun and Mr. Pitarresi.

To the question “What do you think an Eco-school is for you ?” Mr. Thun answered, and I quote:“Eco school is an eco environment in which any student or teacher can leave quietly and without creating waste and wasting energy.” He added: “It's not just a matter of food, we are focusing on, but actually it is a lot of habits that we should change in our everyday life: how we separate the different bins in a correct way, but that’s not happening in our classes. Mr Pitarresi then further explained how he viewed the concept of being an “eco-school” by saying: “An eco school for me, if i can be honest, is a way of living, so when i think about an eco school i think about a way of living and in my opinion it's like a big lesson”. He added on to that statement with: “I'm a chemistry teacher and I've been studying sustainable chemistry all my life so I specialise in everything related to sustainability”.

These two people are helping his environment to create a better world, so we asked “why did you come up with this eco school day idea?”

Furthermore, we asked about the reasoning behind this idea. We asked them why they would decide to go through the trouble of organising this whole event. Mr. Thun responded that this whole eco school project was proposed by Mr Pitarresi himself. He also stated that schools are wider because of the organisation Eco-School that has a protocol with standards to reach when talking about ecological goals. Furthermore, he explained that Mr Pitarresi asked the school to continue this project in the lower MYP such as MYP2 and MYP3 but then he proposed to his colleagues to participate with every subject by organising one day for the sake of the planet. But since Mr Pitarresi proposed the idea, what was his reasoning behind this whole day? Well, he told us: “First things first, the eco school program is very important as all the students around the world are participating in this”. He came up with this idea so that he can get his students to become sustainable.

You might be asking, why did these teachers invent this day ? This is how Mr. Thun responded: “Well it's linked with the question before and it's simply organising as we are all scattered around because everything is moving around and in different directions but with the same goal”.

Mr Pitarresi explained: “If i can be honest, I always read articles related to sustainability all news related to ecology and suddenly i came up with this eco school program”

We wanted to grill them a bit by putting them under fire with the question: “what do you do for the school to become eco-friendly?” Mr Thun honestly responded : “Well first of all, by showing them that I'm not perfect at all, but I try. And I say to them to behave in a way that they can get inspired by my actions more than my words. Such as in class, everyday life I try to transmit the understanding of the natural world in a way” he also said that you can make your own choices, at the end of the day you choose if you want to help out the environment or not.

While Mr Pitarresi responded: “I think that I can inspire my students by letting them work together as collaboration is a way to learn from each other and always believe as we grow as a community like working on a big problem starting” from PYP1 to even DP1 and everyone in between. He also said “We have a big issue related food wise that we can work on together”

Towards the end, he told us about what he personally does to make our school eco friendly: “In general? That's a good question we are not doing enough at the moment even if we try but we haven’t been on our behaviour rules yet and it should be coming from the students so what i am doing in my life is what i'm doing at school i already made my choice in general but i see that I don’t do enough and sometimes I don’t tell the students to separate the waste in the bins”. On the other hand, Mr Pitarresi told us: “Maybe I’ve already talked to my students about sustainability and doing it all my life in university and now I have the opportunity to let them be sustainable. For me what’s really important is to find a collaboration with different people.” Mr Pitarresi added: “We are going to Venice Lago and we are going to plant trees so taking action not just about being eco friendly we must take action and observe the climate change in that area with the M5 students and the DP1 students and discuss the situation.”

In conclusion, these comments showed us that even our teachers want to save the earth by ecological sustainability and try to do anything they can and could do, as they told us they’re goal for eco school day is to make our school greener.

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