To coincide with International Education Day, Suara Cooperativa publishes the “Good Practices in Circular Economy” report to highlight the importance of educating with sustainability values in order to curb climate change.
For several decades, experts of all kinds have been making their predictions about how we will confront the challenges that the planet throws at us as a society. There are always “deadline” dates: it seemed that shaking us up economically in 2008 was one, and also that stopping the clocks and freezing hopes of normality in 2020 was another.
The expert voices that speak to us don’t make us want to listen either: they sound like angry parents scolding us for eating a whole chocolate bar. They constantly repeat very similar content: “The world is ending”, “There is no planet B”, “We don’t deserve the place we live”; all of which makes us think that we live in a horror movie.
Neither paternalism nor catastrophism will be able to make us suddenly wake up one day with an epiphany, but the expert Manel Gazo, who gave a talk on October 2 to the workers of Suara Cooperativa, we believe that he can be one of the references to follow for us. “Let’s reinvent the wheel” suggested to us. We use our energies to create, not to destroy. “Reinvent” as a creative exercise, not something that sounds like punishment. “Let’s reinvent” all together, each with a different task and effort but in the plural and without using guilt to achieve results. “Let’s reinvent the wheel” because in nature everything is already circular, we just have to copy it.
Circular Economy Best Practices Report
Some of our services have already assimilated this concept of circularity very well, as demonstrated by the Circular Economy Best Practices Report, which has been prepared by the team of the Social Digital Lab, the social innovation laboratory of Suara Cooperativa. To prepare the report, the managements of 50 services of the organization were interviewed, of which 63.3% assured that they recycle adequately.
For example, at the CRAE de l'Albera, packaging is reused to create craft projects. At the CAI Zona Franca, they use pallets to build their own furniture or material for their vegetable garden, while creating a clothing cycle in which the garments are used until their total useful life is exhausted. Likewise, more than half of Suara's services recycle appropriately in their spaces, as shown in this report, in which the service managements have collaborated through a survey in which they have been able to contribute.
Suara Nursery Schools, a benchmark within the cooperative
At Suara Cooperativa we wanted to release this report today, coinciding with International Education Day and, without a doubt, if we want to build a more sustainable world for all, we must start educating in the values of the circular economy from early childhood. For this reason, our service for the childhood, specially, Nursery Schools, some of them with the Green Schools label, are currently a benchmark in this regard.
Not only do they recycle plastic or paper and cardboard components for their projects; they also have solar panels installed as their main energy source, collect water from dryers and lunch cups to water their plants or explore how to resolve the waste generated by diapers, experimenting with liniment as a sustainable alternative. This is due to the fact that the Green Schools Commission helps to involve not only the little ones in these processes, but also families in order to create comprehensive solutions.
So that your knowledge or that of other services is not forgotten, at the end of the document different experiences of good practices are collected that any person or company can implement in their day to day life to be more sustainable.
It is now our turn to strengthen our weaknesses and copy the expertise of those who know best: be it nature itself or our colleagues who are able to create notebooks with recycled sheets. Any day is a good day to make a small change towards sustainability.
We have been able to extract all this information thanks to the collaboration of all the Service Departments that have participated in the survey of Good Practices in Circular Economy at Suara Cooperativa.
Margalida Calahorro-Bover
Technical Innovation and Maker Community and Circular Economy
