T'Overbeek on #MissionLess against plastic

The action day #MissionLess wants to encourage pupils to use less disposable plastic. In primary school T'Overbeek in Brussels Ganshoren, this has been evident for years.

Stonehenge made of PET bottles

While in the bare crown of the beech behind them, a plastic bag is flapping in the cold northern wind, Marcel, Bilel, Adam, Cyriel and Eya are pushing the bottles in their vegetable garden a little deeper into the ground. The bottles form a plastic fence, and with its oval shape, the circle reminds one of Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument in the south of England. Before the summer, these pupils from the third and fourth year of primary school T'Overbeek in Ganshoren put forty strawberry plants in the ground here. They gave the plants lots of water and love, and all summer long they looked forward to the delicious fruit that would grow on the plants. But on the first school day of the new year, an unpleasant surprise awaited them.

Cyriel: 'All our plants were gone. The workers of the municipality mowed them down by accident, along with the grass.'

Bilel: 'Only the sunflowers were still there.'

Marcel: 'Then we came up with the idea of making a fence out of bottles.'

Eya: 'In plastic.'

Adam: 'To finally do something useful with all the litter we pick up in the forest.'

Cyriel: 'First we had to see which strip of the vegetable garden we were going to use and clearly mark out the lines. Then we dug ten centimetres deep in those lines and
and put all the bottles in. And then we hung a string between the bottles , to keep them upright.'

Eya: 'It was fun to do.'

Adam: 'So we can give a second life to the plastic bottles.'

No to disposable

The enthusiasm and awareness of the young pupils do not come out of the blue. Attention to the environment and climate has been a cornerstone of T'Overbeek for years. The Brussels primary school, located between a cluster of apartment buildings and a piece of forest, wants to make children aware from an early age of the negative impact of plastic on animals, nature and people. I started here in 2010 and in the meantime, this awareness has completely crept in,' says teacher Karen Lietaert, who sets up and closely supervises the sustainability projects at this school. In the beginning, we gave many more specific lessons about it, now it all happens very spontaneously. Nobody comes in here with a plastic bottle of water anymore, that's what you want to achieve as a school in the end'.

The teachers often work on specific projects. They explain how to sort correctly or let their class pick up litter with pegs on their way to the swimming pool. Recently, they organised a swap fair with discarded toys to encourage the second-hand idea. 'And in subjects such as WO or Language Method, the issue is often discussed anyway,' says Karen. 'When children leave here after six years, they know very well what can and cannot be done. So we start early. In nursery class, for example, we worked for a while with the concept of 'the rubbish police'. Some pupils wore capes and went around the classrooms to check whether everything had been sorted correctly. So it starts with the very youngest.'

At the beginning of each school year, a Zero Waste Day is held to underline the basic principles. Water, biscuits, fruit or sandwiches: at T'Overbeek the pupils all enter the school without disposable plastic packaging. Only durable, reusable bottles, boxes and packaging are allowed.

'So we actually have no waste at school', says Karen. 'If children do bring rubbish to school, they are always asked about it. In the first few years, this happened quite often. Every time the other children would start shouting: 'Look, look, he's got plastic with him! As if it was a real bogeyman. But in the meantime, avoiding plastic has become such a habit that it rarely happens again. The biggest problem are the passers-by. Quite a lot of people throw rubbish over the fence, or leave plastic lying around on the pavement, which then is blown into our garden. If the pupils should ever see someone throwing away rubbish, I don't think it would go down well with that person.'

#MissionLess

Today, the school is participating in #MissionLess, a day of action that introduces pupils to the 'Pyraminder' by De Transformisten: a five-step plan for conscious consumption, from 'use what you have' to 'buy'. In 2020, #MissionLess was about 'food loss'. In 2021, the central theme is 'disposable plastic'.

Marcel: 'We also try to use as little plastic as possible at home'.

Bilel: 'We tell our mum and dad'.

Eya: "I save the cardboard boxes from the food and together with my brother we make toys out of them. One time we made a piñata.'

Adam: 'And we try to waste less. If I have food left over, I give it to our chickens. Sometimes we give eggs to our neighbour.'

Cyriel: 'If we have food left over, we eat the same food the next day.'

On research

Half of the plastic produced is intended for one-time use and many of those single-use plastics (SUPs) end up in nature or contribute to the plastic soup in the ocean. That is why the nineteen pupils from the sixth grade of T' Overbeek are conducting a comparative study today. This morning, the class of teacher Bart Decoster was divided into two groups and went to two different shops in the neighbourhood: one to a classic department store, the other to a packaging-free shop a bit further away.

Both groups bought the same ingredients: onions, carrots, celery, tomatoes, pasta and vegetarian mince. This afternoon, they will each prepare their own pasta and then compare the two heaps of packaging. The onions, shallots, carrots, celery and tomatoes are taken out of the shopping bags and put on the cutting boards in turns. Knives and peelers are tested for sharpness. The capellini fall to the ground like Mikado sticks. 'Be careful,' jokes Bart, 'because we don't want blood in our pasta. It's vegetarian and it has to stay that way.'

When the eyes have stopped watering ('Those onions sting!') there is an empty waste box at one table. The other table, with the pupils who have done their shopping in the classic department store, has collected a box full of disposable plastic. The difference is obvious.

Bilel: 'At the "Chiro", I just saw a crow eating an empty bag of chips.'

Eya: 'There is still too much litter on the ground around here.'

Adam: 'Plastic is bad, also for the animals. It can kill them.'

'Come on,' says Karen. 'Take the boxes inside so that you can hang the rubbish on a clothesline to make a garland. We will hang them in the playground to inform the whole school about the difference in plastic between the two shops.'

Someone asks: 'When are we going to eat? I'm hungry.'

Dreams

Later, when they are even bigger than now, Marcel, Bilel, Adam, Cyriel and Eya dream about great futures. But for now, they stay outside in the vegetable garden, near their Stonehenge of plastic. 'I often notice that children who have more difficulty with basic skills flourish when they are working in the garden,' says Karen. She still has one dream left: animals at school. With the foxes in the neighbourhood it is not so obvious, but one day it will come. The pupils of the third and fourth year also have plenty of dreams.

Cyriel: 'I dream of becoming a drummer.'

Marcel: 'And I cook.'

Eya: 'Lego-maker. Or a musician.'

Bilel: 'Pilot.'

Adam: 'Animal keeper!'

A report by Always Hungry and Lander Deweer (2021)