Below is an article written by members of the PULCHRA team in a school in the Czech Republic on their school’s fantastic PULCHRA project looking at how their town deals with litter.
Within the PULCHRA project, our team of researchers from the elementary Czech school in Ledeč nad Sázavou decided to explore the workings of how our town deals with litter. We also want to focus on the inhabitants of our hometown – whether they are willing to separate the waste and if yes, how.
We have created an anonymous questionnaire about waste separation in each household. Our goal was to approach as many of Ledeč’s citizens as possible and to inform the public about the importance of waste separation. We will also highlight the fact that by separating the waste, we will lower the total amount of waste produced by the whole town. This will also help people save some money on waste collection fees.
With help from experts from Charles University’s Faculty of science Department of Geoinformatics and Cartography, we are creating an interactive map where one candidate finds all the information we’ve gathered as well as photographs of places where separated waste is collected. Our team of researchers will then propose how to lower the amount of waste we produce and how to better handle our waste.
We are planning a public event despite the fact that public events are currently forbidden. At this moment, we are weighing up utilizing the format of nature trails and creating an informational campaign about waste.
The roles in our team of researchers were divided so that various smaller teams were created. One of these teams is the technical support team. They created and are now taking care of the https://ledec-odpadky.webnode.cz/ website as well the Facebook page of the project (https://www.facebook.com/projekt.pulchra). Another one of our teams, a team of reporters, informs about the course of the projects and the results of our work on these platforms. We’re also sending the articles we write to the local newspaper.
By participating in this project, we will gain not only the methodological, financial and professional help from the educational center Tereza, but also an opportunity to work with experts from Charles University or with scientists from all around Europe. Another positive aspect of our participation in the project is the fact it develops our communication skills in English.
Petra Holatová, Monika Kubátová a Michal Simandl, members of the PULCHRA team
