Glimpses of the YEE Actions for the World Environment Day 2020!

The 5th of June is recognized as the World Environment Day (WED), established by the United Nations for encouraging worldwide awareness and action to protect our environment. The theme of WED for 2020 was “Time For Nature”, an opportunity to highlight the fact that living things on Earth are connected in the web os life and how we can act #ForNature. 

We here at the Youth and Environment Europe (YEE) became part of the international day dedicated to the environment, World Environment Day 2020. 

Under the theme “Time For Nature”, YEE celebrated WED 2020 by organizing a Clean-Up activity, where YEE’s partners based on Prague and citizens of Prague were invited to join the action throughout the city – starting from the YEE office that during the WED was entitled as YEE Clean-up base. The YEE clean-up activity was joined by the amazing IYNF team members, where jointly we succeeded to fill around 3-4 bags of trash, in Prague Vinohrady district. We would like to thank Uklidme Cesko for providing bags and gloves that were used for the clean-up activity. 

Besides, YEE member, the Federation of Youth Clubs of Armenia (FYCA) became part of the YEE’s actions for the WED 2020 by organizing at the local level, three Clean-up activities in different parts of Armenia, specifically in – Aramus, Charencavan & Yerevan. Despite these hard days of the pandemic, Armenian youth gathered to clean our beautiful planet and to celebrate WED together with YEE.

Meanwhile, the team of the “Month of Peer Learning with YEE” initiative, within the frame of WED 2020 conducted an interactive online lecture for discussing waste incineration dilemmas – facilitated by Monika Gričnik and Lovro Jecl from EGEA Ljubljana. Lovro is a geography student – currently on a gap year, writing his thesis and working at the Slovenian Geodetics Institute; president at the Slovenian Young Geographers’ student club. Monika is in her first year of master degree, specializing in physical and environmental geography with GIS, also working in Ljubljana Regional Waste Management Centre, leading tours and explaining the circular economy concept to visitors from all over the world. 

At the lecture, we had a chance to learn the details of the incineration and the dilemmas that surround the subject. We learned the technical aspects of incineration that demand the plants constantly running at a certain temperature, therefore, there should be a constant waste supply. This need goes against the principle reduce-reuse-recycle and creates a visious cycle and a demand for waste production. Participants were actively engaged in discussing this and other dilemmas. We were happy to see a great interest in the lecture, not just from students and young professionals, but also from long-standing professionals in the field of waste management who attended the lecture.

Finally, we would like to thanks our YEE Member Organisations partners who reacted and supported the actions undertaken by YEE within the frame of the World Environment Day.