Author:
Knut Wimberger
Short summary:
With the cold season starting in Austria, the Plastic Pirates set sail again to rescue the city of St.Pölten from the pollution that occured throughout summer.
Even if it is not a traditional continental European holiday, Halloween is a good indicator for the begin of winter. As a matter of fact, the druids of Ireland celebrated the beginning of the winter season on November 1st long before the Christian calendar was imposed upon the pagan Celts. Samhain, the festival of the dead, marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter – the darker half of the year.
With winter in the country, autumn leaves on the ground and low vegetation, the Plastic Pirate season begins for Green Steps STP. Once a month we loot the landscape and collect a rich bounty of trash. Sunday, November 14th, eleven brave pirates met at Otto Glöckel primary school’s playground to embark on a courageous crusade against mindless environmental polluters.
We cleaned the playground and the school bus stop from beer bottles and hundreds of cigarette buts. We collected in total 47kg of trash on our route from the school to Rudolf Kirschschläger playground. We emptied the trash bags and sorted its content in metal, glass, recyclable plastic and residual waste. We told each other stories about the people and what crosses their minds when they discharge their trash in nature. We noticed that whenever people don’t think they are watched by others, they believe that nature is a big trash bin.
Good music, good mood and a yummy cookies as reward for our efforts made this opening event a great experience and we invite more pirates to join our fearless crew!
Read more about Plastic Pirates in these library entries:
Müllsammeln mit den Grünen St. Pölten
How to turn children into pirates
Little pirates, big practical teaching
Little boxes: how our property laws impact climate change
The future of work and education
Plastic Pirates – a quest on awareness for plastic pollution
