Mark L. Miller
@marklawmiller
Greta’s amazing campaign for better policies against climate change has led to some first practical results.
First, the Exctinction Rebellion bursted out in London, then, a Commons motion that declares environment and climate change emergency was passed by UK’s parliament.
This is the power of a well developed environmental #activism.
We want to stick to the same type of activism to face another environmental problem: #waste.
Here’s our petition for better waste separation and recycling in Austrian student dormitories. If you want, sign it and send it back to us.
Text of the petition
Most of our daily household waste can be recycled. Our paper, plastic, glass and metal waste are valuable resources that can be reused to create new materials. All EU countries have learned to recycle waste and reuse its valuable resources. Austria itself recycles more than 1M tons of packaging and waste paper per year. That’s about 90% of the overall packaging waste (ARA, 2018). Such a high recycling rate is only possible thanks to a proper household waste separation.
The packaging recycling rate of student dorms is clearly below the national average. Is this because students don’t care about recycling or because the waste separation system is inefficient? Why are Home4students dorms in Innsbruck separating paper, plastic, glass and metal waste so badly? Why are there only organic and unrecyclable waste bins in our dorms’ kitchens? Wouldn’t it be better to also have paper, plastic, metal and glass bins?
Sources: (ARA) Altstoff Recycling Austria. (2018). Recycling. [online] Available at: www.ara.at/kreislauf-wirtschaft/verpackungsrecycling/ (Accessed 2019.03.13).
If you are in favor of a better waste separation system in your kitchen dorm, which allows you to separate paper, plastic, glass and metal properly, sign the petition. You can also sign it if you don’t live in a student dorm but you want to support the petition. If you are not in favor or you have better ideas to improve waste separation in student dorms’ kitchen drop a comment.
I personally believe that if the system gives us students easy ways to separate waste, we will do it.
PS: The petition for a better waste separation and recycling in Tyrolean students dorms is now online at openpetition.eu/!mxgqp (in English) and at openpetition.eu/!studentrecycling (in German).
May 3, 2019
