The Recycling Principle

Presentation for Comenius October2012

Klasse 9aChristoph Probst Gymnasium

Gilching

What is RECYCLING?We live in a closed system in space: on our planet earth.Recycling is the principle to organize life by using as few energy as possible.

The recycling principle makes it possible to live and recreate in closed circuits.

Recycling is a must for all people.

It´s strange, that it´s not normal for us people to organize our life like this.

This biological circuit: „ eat and be eaten“ shows that one feeds the next one.That´s how a biotop works.

As we are part of nature it should be like that:

But instead of using and handing over, we produce trash, which we destroy.74% of the trash could be recycled today, but that doesn´t happen.

Where we live, we have to sort our trash and bring it to a special place.This is voluntary, not many people do it.

In our comunity we have a yellow bag, to collect the packaging waste.We place that outside the house, so it will be picked up by the comunity.

The big amount of unsorted waste from our houses gets burnt to produceelectricity.

Glass, paper and tins are collected and get recycled.

The recycling of aluminium is very complicated and expensive. Until today, plastic packaging can´t get recycled properly.One problem is the loss of energy by recycling, the other is the low quality ofthese products, some are even poisonous.

The recycling isn´t done in our region.But we have a center for recycling in a small village nearby: The composter in HadorfWhat happens there and how the recycling works, we have documented and we will show you with our film:

Biological waste as the waste produced in our garden is recycled naturally.Factories producing biological goods work similarly.The presentation of one of the experts for recycling in our area has informed us about the closed circuit of our clothes.

There are special containers everywhere.

The old clothes are sorted into different categories and some sold in second-hand shops. Others are sold to economically less developped countries outside Europe.The rest is used to produce cleaning cloth and insulating material, e.g. for the car industry.

For 30 years we have got the so called „dual system“. That means that the producer is responsible for the waste, it has to recycle and pay for it.

In every county there are collecting points. You can bring the packaging there, then it will be recycled.

Bottles are brought back to the producer.

By law the industry is forced to pay for the waste of their packaging. A great number of firms are working with the green point. In the dual-system they organize the collecting of their packaging. you can recognize by the symbol.

Unfortunately the recycling of these articles doesn´t work!

The commerce of trash also leads to crime.

We have got many private initiatives for recycling:

There are:

fleamarketssecond-hand shopsexchange centres

to buy, sell and exchange goods for a good price avoiding rubbish.

In the arts´lessons we have thought about recycling without wasting energy. So we invented a new people:

a people of rubbish and their culture:

the „Müllies“

With humor and fantasy three classes have worked on the project.We have produced things on our own like people in the Stone Age.And class 7e invented a fashion collection of rubbish.

Class 5e has produced figures and masks out of packaging.

We created a wall of hunting trophees.

Sometimes we find other Müllies in our surroundings – people who create funny things out of rubbish.

People in economically less developped countries need recycling to survive!