FoodTreasure is an educational project that familiarizes the whole school community with the sector of the circular economy through the case study of food and food waste, elements common to everyone. It aims to make learning about organic waste issues not only fun and interactive, but also formative in changing habits and introducing life-long ecological behaviors.
The project works with educators, schools and pupils to encourage critical thinking, hands-on environmental education – starting with food waste- and encourages teachers and children to think for themselves, work cooperatively and develop problem solving skills to apply to the issues around them.
Rather than simply learning facts about the environment, FoodTreasure’s approach to education encourages engagement with the environment and emotional investment in the issues, which will lead to more environmentally conscious and active young citizens.
Through FoodTreasure, and among other activities, school competitions (approved by the Ministry of Education) have been held for 3 years (and have gained approval for 2023) engaging educators to work with children of all ages in creating fun, relevant, effective and innovative ideas for circular economy projects in schools. These competitions have supported teachers in getting young people enthusiastic about circularity issues and in thinking critically and working in teams to come up with small scale solutions. Some of the ideas put into practice by school children involve: creating a ‘clothes swap event together with educating each other about the environmental impacts of the garment industry; repurposing old desks into cupboards and coat hangers; creating a fun video of a ‘superhero’ who encourages reuse of materials, not just recycling, and more.
This project highlights, besides sustainable food systems and nutrition, the concept of circular economy and its significance and importance in education for sustainability. This is a strong point of this practice, since it introduces another sustainability concept, one that has applications outside of the specific scope of EduNUT.
FoodTreasure promotes emotional learning, encouraging the students to invest emotionally to the issues that it deals with. This can be of value since it has been supported that emotional investment cand prolong someone’s interests and keep people engaged.
We think that FoodTreasure has great replicability potential since part of the programme are school competitions which means that many schools can participate simultaneously and that there is a lot of freedom in the ideas that students will choose to present in these competitions.
