Awareness day for the youngest during the Monaco Ocean Week

This year, BeMed convened with the youth for an afternoon of awareness-raising organized during the second edition of the Monaco Ocean Week (from 8^th to 14^th of April 2018).

The objective of this event was to bring children to realize the magnitude of the problem and to make them think of simple solutions that one can implement in his or her everyday life.
Five educational workshops were organized:

The Quiz workshop

Children took part in a quiz about the plastic waste problem.  Waste production and degradation time, recycling, and impacts on the environment and human health were all addressed

  1. And you, do you know how much plastic wastes enter the Ocean? 

By putting their hand in an opaque box, children had to guess which waste commonly found on our beaches they had touched. Once identified, they sorted them within the right wastebin.

 2. And you, do you know what are the most common plastic wastes found on our beaches?

The «waste degradation time» workshop

The children became aware of the degradation time of wastes entering the Ocean by putting them in order from the most degradable to the least.

 3. In your opinion, how many marine turtle generations are needed for a plastic bag to degrade?

Atelier « The “Ocean heroes” workshop

By sharing ideas on what one can do in its everyday life to curb plastic pollution in our Ocean, children were led to identify the three watchwords: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (the three R). They took home their “hero card” on which they had written the three actions they preferred, one for each category.

 4. What about you? What did you do for the Ocean today?

The “message in a bottle” workshop

Playing captain Nemo in The Mysterious Island (Jules Verne), children were the bearers of the Ocean. Each message was shared with the rest of the group and dropped in a bottle. All messages were then gathered in a comments book for everyone to read.

5. You too! Send us your message for the Ocean!

On this occasion, the students of the CM1A class of the Fontvielle school shared with us a song on the theme of plastic pollution. Watch the video

Read the messages from the CM1A class, school of Fontvielle.

Read the messages from the CM1C class, school of Saint Charles.

Read the messages from the CM1 class, school of Saint Maur.

Responses

1. More than 8 million tonnes of plastic waste enter the Ocean every year- which is equivalent to dumping the contents of one bin lorry into the ocean every minute. (sources: Jambeck et al. 2015 – Science)
2. A study, led by the Surfrider Foundation Europe and carried out on different beaches in Europe, identified the 10 worst polluting wastes on our beaches. The number one enemy is the cigarette butt closely followed by plastic bags, plastic bottles and their caps and cotton buds. More information at surfrider.eu.
3. Marine turtles live on for 60 to 80 years. It takes more than 450 years for a plastic bag to degrade (sources: Palmisano and Pettigrew 1992 – Bioscience). More than six turtle generations have therefore the time to be born, to live and to die before a plastic bag would disappear entirely from our Ocean.
4. Some ideas: use a reusable bag instead of a plastic bag; carry a flask with you rather than buying a plastic water bottle; turn down plastic straws and cutleries; offer to use your own reusable box for takeaway food; chose solid soap rather than shower gel.
5. Send your messages to the mailing address contact@beyondplasticmed.org .