Buy less, choose well, make it last

Vivienne Westwood

What is the idea behind zero waste anyway?

Feel free to join a short thought experiment: When you get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and take a shower. The toothpaste tube, the toothbrush, the bottles for shampoo, shower gel and conditioner – everything is made of plastic. Then you go to the kitchen and make yourself a sandwich for work. The toast, the cheese, the ham and the peppers – everything comes from a triple layer of plastic. On the way to work, you get a coffee at the bakery – once again the lid is plastic. Now imagine that all these packaging materials are collected in a pile, probably this collection is quite big and only for the first hours of your day. Imagine how much plastic and waste in general accumulates in the course of the day for just one person.

Zero Waste is generally not about actually reducing waste to zero, as this is unfortunately almost impossible, but about increasingly resorting to sustainable, biologically degradable solutions and thus protecting the environment by avoiding waste.

What is sustainable travelling?

https://sustainabletravel.org/top-10-tips-for-sustainable-travel/

We decided to find out the difference between travelling the traditional way or doing it in a sustainble manner. Our experiment was carried out during the trips to and from our project meeting in Sønderborg, Denmark.

Twelve enthusiastic persons representing 4 European countries meet at EUC Syd in May 2022 in the project Train to Sustain. The topic was sustainability in many relations and contexts.

We need more globes

“Sønderborg Forsyning”, www.sonfor.dk, demonstrated how to handle waste and wastewater and here we learned about involvement of society, citizens, and educational programs from primary school and onwards throughout the whole education system – from ABC to PhD.
High-end engineering in combination with a clear vision is told to the public through events and clever information really made a change and impact in Sønderborg.

We need more globes if we keep consuming as we do now:
The world 1.6 – Denmark 4.2

According to Industry Europe, European textile consumption ranks number four in the terms of environmental impact after food, housing and mobility. Textiles is the third highest area of consumption of water and land use, and fifth highest for the use of primary raw material.

Textiles are used in clothing, household goods, furniture, medical and protective equipment and makes a day of our everyday life and the production and consumption of textiles continue to grow.

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation global textile production almost doubled between 2000 and 2015. The European Environment Agency expect textiles consumption to grow by 63% by 2030.

In this article, we want to introduce the Green Tech Cluster to you, which is located in Styria, Austria. The Green Tech Cluster is a global centre for innovative energy and environmental technology. It was founded in 2005 with 80 organisations. Nowadays, it consists of more than 200 companies and research institutions. Together, they want to make our planet greener.

The aim of Green Tech Cluster is to show that sustainable actions do not only cause costs, but they lead to a global competitive advantage. Therefore, the member organisations of the cluster are working on many diverse innovative solutions for more sustainable and circular actions and processes in different fields:

Omnia’s student restaurants are constantly striving to find new ways to increase the amount of vegetarian food, reduce waste and operate in a safe manner.

Resurrect your Bread – again and again…

Reusing old bread in new bread recipes is a common way to use leftovers from a previous bread production.
According to various experiments (in house), it is possible to add up to 20% old bread in a bread recipe – of the same type of bread. There is a few conditions, which must be met in the process.

The bread should not be moulded in any way it is easy to smell if the bread has started to mould – it smells like an “old wet basement” or if the mould is visible on the bread. Discharge the whole bread if it is mouldy.

When we hear about Artificial Intelligence, we can immediately associate it with concepts such as technology, innovation, automation, robotics, efficiency, and even possibly the replacement of human beings.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that is part of the Computer Science area and is understood as the development of machines with the ability to learn, which are programmed in advance, making use of well-elaborated and complex algorithms that provide decision-making and problem solving, extrapolations and even interactions based on the data provided (Damaceno and Vasconcelos, 2018). In a more simplified way, we can consider that one of the goals of AI is the development of machines that carry an intelligent behavior, very similar to human behavior, so that they can act in complex environments (Nilsson, N., 1998).

In Vaasa we have one of the oldest waste management companies in Finland called Stormossen. We got a opportunity to visit them in June 2021.

Enviromental educator Sini Hemming presented us their activities.

From 14 to 16 September, our first Online Learning Teaching Training Activity took place. The first day was used to give the participants an introduction to the city of Graz and the VET system in Austria. In addition, we gained insights into the topic of sustainability in teaching by having Ms Hübner, University of Klagenfurt, present sustainable initiatives as well as the project BuNE-Z, in which she is involved. Afterwards, the materials for the theory package that had been prepared up to the event were presented and evaluated by the participants. This first day came to a pleasant end with a quiz on Austrian culture.