SAY “NO” TO PLASTIC!

Report by the student council of Quirinus-Gymnasium Neuss (Spring 2019)

Single-use plastic items are still a huge problem in Germany although hundreds of thousands of Germans work for companies that collect, recycle and dispose rubbish. Some of these are municipal companies, others are privately owned. This dual public-private system is based on Germany’s 1991 packaging law (the “Verpackungsordnung”), and the industry-funded Green Dot recycling scheme. This means that German municipalities and companies jointly recycle German waste. Companies add the Green Dot logo to packaging they promise to collect and recycle. However, critics say that companies only actually recycle a small fraction of materials they collect. For example, billions of plastic straws end up as waste. When we buy vegetables at the supermarket they are often wrapped up in plastic. These single-use plastics end up in rubbish dumps or in our oceans. In order to raise awareness to the problem of single-use plastics, the student council of our school, the Quirinus-Gymnasium Neuss, prepared a “plastic-free breakfast”. We wanted our fellow students to realize that it is better to avoid plastic waste piling up in the first place. That is why we first prepared some posters in order to inform our fellow students and then we spent a lot of time with talking to farmers, bakers, butchers etc. as we wanted to buy the different ingredients of the breakfast (bread, cheese, fruit,…) directly from the producers without any plastic packaging. In the end we were able to offer some orange juice (freshly made!), fruit salad, bread/rolls with cheese and cucumbers etc. during the school breaks on 7th February and 10th June. Here you can see some pictures that were taken by our teacher Mr Franz Materne…