"Wasteless Karelias" project team asked Karelian school students about waste related issues

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Survey results from Russian villages

At the end of February, "Wasteless Karelias" project team has been visiting three target Karelian villages – Tolvuya, Naistenjarvi and Vedlozero. We held talks with the village administrations and discussed plans for the near future.

 

 

But the main aim of the trip was to visit schools where we will work with students: conduct trainings on environmental and waste issues, participate in clean-ups (traditional “subbotniki”), organize a challenge between schools for separate waste collection. We established a good dialogue and cooperation with school administrations and conducted a survey with pupils, asking their attitude to littering, sorting waste at home and desiring to have a cleaner environment in their home villages.

 

 

A total of 271 students from ages 8 to 18 took part in our survey, and now we have received the first results of the survey thanks to our colleagues from the Institute of Economics of the Karelian research center of RAS. As we expected, littering in the villages is inconvenient for the absolute majority of young people (almost 97%).

 

 

Every fifth consider their home village “dirty” or “very dirty”, and only every tenth as “clean” or “very clean”.

 

 

At the same time, a slightly surprising result showed replies to the question on waste sorting: 45% of students said that their family does not sort waste at home, but almost the same amount said they "always" or "sometimes" sort waste.

 

 

We didn’t specify what kids mean by "sorting", as, for example, composting food waste in the yard is also type of sorting. We'll find this out in further communication. At the end of April and beginning of May, we return to Russian Karelia again to conduct trainings and participate in school clean-ups.

In the meanwhile, waste collection and sorting (for example in Tolvuya, Medvezhiegorsk district of Karelia) looks like this:

 

 

Photo: Moritz Albrecht, WLK