Environmental transformation

The consumption materials are increasing due to the rising world population. At the same time, the waste materials from these consumption materials are increasing. The ecosystem can clean some waste with a certain proportion in a couple of years, or in a longer period. However, the quantity of waste has increased over the ecosystem’s cleaning power.

Among the solid waste in the environment, plastic bottles are decomposed in 1000 years, aluminium boxes in 10-100 years, plastic milk bottles in 5 years, orange peels in 6 months, gums in 5 years, batteries in 100 years, plastic bags in 10-20 years, paper in 2-5 months, and glass bottles in 4000 years. The fact that the decomposing time of waste is long requires the necessity of recycling such waste to be re-used.

Collecting the waste materials at home, work, offices and schools for recycling and creating benefits for the economy enable us to save in many areas such as energy, water, natural sources and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure recycling and raising awareness of people about it in order to eliminate waste in society, to protect human and environmental health and to ensure the economic development. Although the studies are still conducted in this regard, the necessary devotion to recycling the waste materials has not been performed well. Through this project, we aim that people will comprehend the importance of recycling the waste materials for the world life, environmental health and economic development. According to this, our goals are as follows:

• Ensuring people not to throw out the recyclable materials such as paper, glass and plastic in the environment, Enabling them to comprehend the importance of recycling in terms of consumption, economy and environment, Contributing to raising younger generations with sensitivity to the environment,
• Raising awareness against the damages to the environment and living beings caused by the waste materials, Providing information about what can be done regarding recycling the waste materials,
• Increasing the social responsibility project in which youngsters put their signatures,
• Helping the Erasmus+ program with reaching wider masses,
• Raising awareness about the disadvantageous people and supporting them to participate in such studies, Minimizing the prejudices against people from different cultures, Raising awareness about global issues, and increasing participation in the volunteering activities, Enabling youngsters to gain new knowledge, skills and experiences.

Profile of participants

Each partner will provide 8 participants and 2 group leaders for the project. The age range of these participants is between 18-30. We paid attention to the general age range of the Erasmus+ programme. The reason why we have not included participants under 18 is that they can face problems in obtaining permission from their parents. Therefore, we determined 18 as the lower limit. At the same time, we determined 30 as the upper limit to prevent negative situations stemming from the generation gap among participants during the project. The partners have also their leaders. These leaders will inform and guide participants about their responsible activities before/during/after the project. In order to realize the project successfully, the work to be conducted by the leaders is significant for us. The leaders will have the following duties; monitoring the activity programme, preparing the activity materials and arranging the activity venues, providing information about how to conduct the activities, asking questions about the topic in the activities, answering the misunderstood points, activity management and control, ensuring active participation of participants, collecting the necessary documents of participants, dealing with the problems of participants, providing solutions for these problems, acting as mediators if there is a kind of disagreement among participants, and informing the guidance and support team in case they cannot provide solutions for the existing problems. The aspects of the group leaders are as follows: There is no age limit for the leaders. While selecting the leaders, we paid attention to the following criteria; they can speak English fluently, they have strong communication skills, they are tolerant and solution-oriented individuals, they possess the sense of responsibility, they are warm-hearted and respectful individuals, and they have the ability to organize. According to these criteria, we determined one leader from each partner.