Dialogues About Waste, or in Russian “DoM” (дом is Russian word for home), is an ecological and awareness raising publication of the Commander Islands Biosphere Reserve for children and their parents about what to do with waste on the Commander Islands, from children living on Bering Island. Most of the materials are prepared by our Waste Patrol - an initiative group of schoolchildren of different ages who are conserned about preservation of local nature.
Since last summer, together with our young colleagues we used the exhibits from Waste Museum to study how hazardous waste is, how to recycle it, turning it into good, and how to save the planet's resources. The children were so carried away by the topic that we did not even notice how the real editorial office of the magazine was organized. However, it is not the first time - Waste Patrol itself appeared just as spontaneously!
Part of Waste Patrol editorial team
The first issue was dedicated to waste paper, and in the second the team decided to talk about plastics: how they are useful, how dangerous, how every person on the planet can help solve a problem and what needs to be done at the level of entire states.
Working on the magazine has proven to be an effective method of environmental education. Each in the editorial office has his or her own role: a week ago second-grader Sasha picked up facts, five-grader Liza studied the dangers of disposing of plastic bags and wrote an article about it, six-grader Dasha analyzed the effectiveness of Boyan Slat's startup in cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, eight-grader Nastya described the art objects of Waste Museum according to all the rules of cataloging.
Our task as employees of Awareness Raising Department of the CINBR is to set vectors, to offer high-quality sources, to teach how to work with them, namely to learn how to distinguish the main from the unimportant, and to show that complex things are not only useful, but interesting! And even if the team do not connect their future lives with the environmental protection, they will gain infromation and teamwork skills necessary in any sphere. In addition, the work on the release about plastic pollution resulted in the topic being studied as fully as possible in accordance with the age of everyone.
Waste Museum exposition is a part of the joint project of the CINBR and the Administration of the Aleutian municipal district on the efficient waste management called Green Commander Islands. As part of the project, collection points for waste batteries have been opened on Bering Island and a number of alternatives to disposable plastic bags have been proposed.
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