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Environmental education: RICREA projects open up to Italian schools abroad
Portal of the Italian language

Environmental education: RICREA projects open up to Italian schools abroad

Categories: Language and education

Ambarabà Ricicloclò®, Riciclick® and Yes, I Can: the initiatives aimed at primary and secondary students around the world are underway.

Ricrea Edu
LOGO RICREA EDU

Increasingly the younger generations are calling out for real changes in the world. But big revolutions sometimes start with small daily gestures, such as proper waste separation.

RICREA, the non-profit National Consortium for the Recycling and Recovery of Steel Packaging, part of the CONAI System, has been working for over twenty years to raise awareness of the value of recycling steel packaging among students. Poetic compositions, photo shoots, performances, debates and comparisons: the initiatives promoted by the Consortium with the patronage of the Ministry of Ecological Transition are aimed at school pupils of all levels throughout the country. Starting this year, the activities are being launched with a section dedicated to students from Italian schools abroad thanks to the collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

Ambarabà Ricicloclò®, Riciclick® and Yes, I Can are three important projects that help us reach children and adolescentsand communicate the importance of the correct separate collection of steel packaging, such as tins, cans, canisters, milk cans, barrels and crown caps,’ commented Federico Fusari, Director of the RICREA Consortium. ‘Steel is a precious resource and a perfect example of a true circular economy, because it can be 100% recycled over and over againEffectively communicating this message to the younger generations is a priority and that is why, in addition to these three projects, RICREA has invested in a dedicated website and social media channels under the name Ricreaedu.’

‘We are happy to have the Italian Schools Abroad, which are central institutions for the Italian Education System in the World, involved in the environmental education projects which are being promoted by Ricrea,’ declared the Embassy Councillor Valentina Setta, Head of Office V of the Directorate General for Cultural and Economic Promotion and Innovation (DGSP) at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. After last year’s experimentation, which saw the participation of Italian primary schools abroad in Ambarabà Ricicloclò®, and after the recent launch of the first international Yes I Can tour, which has already involved Italian secondary schools abroad, we believe that opening up the three initiatives, Ambarabà Ricicloclò®, Riciclick® and Yes, I Can, to students from all over the world will allow us to pursue our goals of promoting the language and Italian culture in a creative and effective way. These are expressed through the language and values that are at the heart of these activities.’

Promoted by Andersen, the Italian monthly magazine on children’s books and children’s culture, Ambarabà Ricicloclò® is an educational project that invites primary school children to play with words to describe the recycling of steel packaging. Through the composition of limericks, short nursery rhymes on the theme ‘recycling for the world’, the young poets will try their hand at the particular AABBA rhyming scheme, mentioning cans, caps, drums, canisters or tins, but also a geographical place, nearby or far, important or unknown, exotic or part of their own lives.

For the ‘digital generations’ of middle schools, registrations are open for the RiciClick® photo contest. Students are asked to take a photo using the Riciclick app on their smartphones, on the theme ‘MI RIFIUTO!’ (a play on the word ‘rifiuto’, meaning both ‘waste’ and ‘I refuse’). The focus of the images will be the various forms of steel packaging that have to be sorted and recycled after use. The Consortium provides teachers and pupils with an educational kit on the website Riciclick, with tutorials to learn how to take effective shots and the educational video ‘A come acciaio’ (S for Steel), which is a must for learning about the life cycle of steel.

The innovative Yes, I Can programme, in which storyteller Luca Pagliari talks to high school students about the best practices of recovering and recycling steel packaging, offers food for thought and invites them to become more aware and responsible so that they can play an active role in protecting the environment. The narrator’s words are accompanied by images, reflections and testimonies related to the steel packaging recycling chain, following its entire path. Despite the health emergency, the project has not abandoned its mission, finding new ways to stay close to the children using video-conferencing.

The positive repercussions of a responsible path have an important impact not only on the environment, but also on the economy: the steel packaging sent for recycling in 2020 made it possible to save 7,732 TJ of primary energy and 417,000 tons of raw material, avoiding the dispersion of 629,000 tons of equivalent CO2. The economic value of the material recovered in one year is equal to 19 million Euros.

For information on how to register and how the initiatives are run, you can consult the site Ricreaedu and its ‘Mondo’ (World) section, dedicated to the participation of Italian schools abroad.

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