Category: Blog 2019

Long time, no see! It’s that time of the semester: it’s starting to get a little colder, sleep deficits are increasing, and fall break is just around the corner. For the past three weeks, the other SLS students and I have been discussing social issues; for example, we’re discussing poverty, domestic and other types of violence, religious persecution, or racial/ethnic persecution as well.

Why? The class is supposed to be about sustainable development, no?

It is; it just so happens that social equality, a healthy society is the third pillar of sustainable development, according to the Agenda 21. We’ve met and volunteered with some ecologically focused projects/associations (like composting with JJ), and did the same with associations focused around mobility (like Metz à Vélo). For the third part of our semester, we’re visiting some organizations around Metz that help people in precarious situations.

The first organization that we met was the Club Unesco in Metz. They came to our class one day and led a workshop with us, teaching us the different types of discrimination, the prejudices that cause that discrimination and potential/existing solutions to combat said discrimination. They were passionate and knowledgeable, only hesitating to answer questions when they were trying to figure out how best to explain it to a bunch of non-native French speakers. They’re taking a trip around Europe over the fall break (Oct. 25 to Nov. 3) in order to teach others, children and other university students like us, about discrimination, as well; unfortunately, all of the members of the SLS program hade made plans for the fall break, so we won’t be joining them. We look forward to seeing the result of their workshops, though.

    
The second organization that we visited was called Carrefour (and no, I don’t mean the popular European grocery store). Carrefour is an organization dedicated to housing, educating, and nationalizing immigrants, young adults (around 18-25 years old), and women who come to France seeking asylum from some form of violence or persecution. They have three types of facilities: one is for young adults (along with a separate facility for young women), a majority of which are illiterate and only able to speak their native language or broken English, the second is for university students seeking affordable housing while getting their degree, and the third is a youth hostel that you can sleep in for free. They’re dedicated to improving the life of every person that comes to them for help, and they get all of it done with only about 100 volunteers. We’ll be going back to participate in a game of soccer and teach them a little about the history of the USA. They encourage all of the children that they house to further pursue their education or try to hook them up with a job at the age that they’re ready. They don’t just alleviate their problems in the present; they teach them to take control of their own lives, how to alleviate their own problems in the future. They encourage the artistic, mathematic, kinesthetic children alike, and try to foster a positive environment for them to regain their footing. I was excited by these people and they helped me to fully understand why society should be included as the third pillar to a sustainable society: people who have a passion for living and the skills to do it will take more care in what they do. Education is extremely important to our cause! Don’t forget it.

We visited another organization the next week that also offers housing, but it’s a little different from Carrefour. Secour de Catholique operates as part of the catholic church in Metz and offers housing, meals, and help with nationalization (gaining citizenship in France) or, even, helping with work. This still seems pretty similar to the work that Carrefour does, but Secour de Catholic works with adults over the age of 25 years old (not young adults or children like Carrefour). On an average day, they open for breakfast around 8h30, which you can purchase for €0.50, then move on to one of the various types of workshops they have (art, studies, cooking, etc.), and then moving on to a dinner (also offered at a cheap price). The workshop room was filled with the art that’s been made by the people working with Secour; it was my favorite part of the visit. Some of the paintings were really beautiful and full of emotion. I’m really happy that a place like this exists, to help people still create something beautiful when they don’t have the resources.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to tell you about cool, French stuff next week because I’ll be on vacation (like I’m not already). I’m going to be traveling to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest over the fall break, which lasts a little more than a week. Don’t miss me too much. Au revoir!

This past week went by really quickly; I had a lot to do and see, so my mind was occupied a lot of the time. It started to get cold in Metz, too, so I had to break out the warmest coat I have (which I fear won’t be up to par with the imminent weather of October). Despite all of this, too, I had an amazing week. We were able to teach some French children about pollution and good practices for a healthy earth while they filmed some short skits about the environment. At the end of the week, we visited a methanation plant and learned a little more about the different types of waste and how this plant has decided to effectively process them.

At a local French elementary school, we were invited to a small class to give a short general lesson with one of our fellow French students, Salimata Coulibaly, working with the European Institute of Ecology. We talked to the children about pollution of the Earth and of our air, deforestation, water pollution (as well), and some solutions to these problems (like recycling and composting). We asked them to propose solutions for these problems to us, and I was genuinely surprised by the amount of knowledge and awareness that the children had, as far as environmental causes are concerned. They advocated for recycling, of course, but specifically, for reducing waste by buying products without plastic packaging and by using reusable bags and water bottles. They thought big, too, explaining that we should hire people to go out on boats and clean the plastic out of the water with giant nets. I was inspired by their excitement in trying to answer our questions; they would talk over each other, yell, and get up out of their seats. I was really proud of them, honestly, that they were that excited about what they knew about living green and that they tried to teach me as well.

After our little lesson, we filmed some skits that they had prepared in groups each covering a different subject that we had just discussed: pollution of the ground, wastefulness, pollution of water, and pollution of air. For each skit, there was an antagonist “polluman” (for pollution) trying to get the other children to pollute or do bad things to the earth and a protagonist “SupErdre” (for the super hero) persuading the children to, instead, do good by the environment. They were assigned roles and memorized a script for each of their little screenplays. I had so much fun helping with the props and feeding the children lines when they forgot them. They must have practiced a lot, though, because I rarely had to help them.

Later in the week, as I said before, we traveled to a methanization plant called Sydeme (Household Waste Union of East Moselle) in Forbach, France where we received an informative presentation, detailing how the plant worked. This particular facility was very interesting to me because we have visited other waste treatment facilities and no other has a procedure quite like this one. They put the work of the sorting on the customer by asking them to sort their trash into “green” waste (compostable, biodegradable wastes) into a green bag, recycling (milk cartons, plastic bottles, cardboard, etc.) into an orange bag, and then everything else into a large blue bag. The bags aren’t too large, though, because they also limit the size of the bag (weight of waste it can hold) to a certain amount per bag in order to motivate people to reduce their waste. After, they’re sorted by color and each go to different locations: recycling goes to a recycling center, general waste (blue bags) go to an incinerator, and the green waste comes to the methanization plant, where we visited. Here, the waste is put into large digesters that stir and regulate the temperature of the mixture. After a series of passes through the process, the waste has been turned into quality fertilizer (liquid part of waste) or nutrient-rich topsoil (solid product of composting). The methane part of the process is in extracting the natural gas that’s released as a product of fermentation in the digesters. This methane is filtered and then stored to use as fuel (for their natural gas vehicles) and for public refueling, as well. They also use the methane as a source of fuel for energy to run the plant, a perfect example of a circular economy. They take people’s green waste and treat it, turning it into topsoil that can be used to grow more food (resulting in green waste), also utilizing the methane produced from that treatment to run the plant. Genius!

My favorite part of the tour was the greenhouse, where we got to see and even taste some of the fruits and veggies that they grow onsite with their composted soil. They’re proud of what they do, and their success shows. People pay a subscription to be a part of this, and all that they’re doing is processing their waste. The valorization of wastes needs to be a more commonplace thing back in the United States. I feel like the only places that do it are far off and unknown. Is there somewhere in Atlanta where I can be a part of good practices like this one? Guess I just found something new to explore on the internet. I’ll keep you all posted!

Hey, guys, what’s good? Have a good week? Let’s dive right in.

One of trips this week was to 3 separate waste treatment facilities: household garbage, industrial waste, and grey water treatment. The household garbage facility and the grey water treatment are both run by the same entity, Haganis, but each center has different goals. At the center for garbage, their goal is to lessen the impact that garbage has on the environment, to clean it up a little. They try as much as they can to recycle, employing a lot of people to hand sort through the material down conveyor belts. They still practice incineration, but don’t use fossil fuels to fuel the fire; instead, they use organic waste to start and keep the fire burning. As if that wasn’t enough to impress me, they also recycle the ashy material left over from the incineration called “mâchefers”. Most of the ashy materials makeup is metallic, so they run it through a magnetic process; the rest of the material is recycled and becomes roadways or sidewalks. That’s resourceful! I was happy with the amount of times they referenced the environment as reasoning for their actions; it’s one of the pillars of their mission as a waste treatment facility: lessening the environmental impact of our waste.

At the Haganis wastewater treatment plant, we got to see how they go about treating all the grey water from people’s homes that arrives there through a large network of pipes. They have a “separated” system, so used water from sinks in the house or washing machines isn’t transported in the pipes with used water from toilets and showers; this helps them keep a majority of the water at a specific level of contamination, instead of further contaminating all of the water that they process. They use gravity to move the water through the pipes towards the facility, utilizing a pump to move the water up over a hill only when necessary. At Haganis, the water is run through a series of basins that aim to decant solid waste and microorganisms and then treat the water for harmful amounts of certain elements (like phosphorous). The system is similar to one that you’d find in the United States, but Haganis, here, takes it one step further than just treating and returning the water to the river. Once they have the “sludge”, the decanted solid materials or dead microorganisms, they can recycle a portion of it instead of burning it all (which I believe is procedure in the United States). They can take the organic waste from the decanter basins and from the basins that remove microorganisms from the water to farms to be used as fertilizer, and they do this extra step for free, without financial incentive. The rest of the sludge is burned or recycled similarly to the mâchefers. At these Haganis facilities, they’re doing their jobs cleaning up the waste that we produce, but they’re also trying to do everything in the light of their environment and what they can do to reuse the waste or lessen the footprint of their facilities’ treatment processes. Pretty inspiring, honestly.

When we made our way to Schroll in Rambas, the industrial waste treatment facility, we got to see what big businesses did with their trash and the kinds of problems that the particular wastes posed for the facility. Paper, for example, isn’t always made so that it’s completely recyclable. There were giant rolls of paper in huge piles just sitting because they must break down each of the rolls to get out the recyclable parts (the thick cardboard roll and the plastic parts of the spindle), and the rest goes to the incinerator. Plastic packaging, the really thin, transparent plastic that’s often used as an outer layer of protection on packages was in the lot in heaps; the facility takes what they can (some plastic packaging is too fragile to be run through machining or extremely harmful to heat up) and heat it up to mold it into “bricks” that can be bought by other companies as recycled plastic material. They do the same thing with cardboard and plastic containers for milk products (for example). Our tour guide, David Lavielle, was transparent throughout the tour, explaining that their process isn’t perfect and that they don’t have any idea what they’re supposed to do with some of the waste that comes through their facility. When all else fails, burn it, but that’s not their goal. They want to be able to properly process and recycle as much as they can, and at the end of the day, it’s our job to help them achieve that. Pay attention to what you buy and use, the makeup of it, the materials that the business uses to make whatever product and stay away from it if it’s mainly composed of non-recyclable materials. The consumer, us, has all the power over businesses and what they produce. If we weren’t buying products that were wrapped 3 times in some harmful, thin plastic packaging, I think the businesses who were suffering from lack of purchases would be hard-pressed not to switch over to organic cardboard or paper packaging.

On a different note than waste, we had a meeting with some lovely, fellow French students and the president, Marie-Anne Isler Beguin, and vice president, Catherine Godignon, of the European Institute of Ecology this past week. We came to discuss the logistics of a film festival that they’re hosting for the second time ever called “CinaMaTerre”; at the festival, you can watch films from all over the world from 2017 to now that challenge and demonstrate different environmental issues socially, economically, and, of course, ecologically. We’ll be helping them out with a specific segment “Youth4Planet” which is a short video in which we ask French children what they think we should do in order to help the environment. There was a press conference that the Institute held with the local newspapers in order to promote the event; there, Lindsey Lovitt and I were asked to film short responses (in English, Dr. Kozhanova was a little disappointed, so that we could help illustrate the international aspect of the festival) detailing how we felt about the festival, our impressions of what their goals were. Like I said for their video, I’m really inspired by the efforts that people are going to not only to help the environment in general, but also to spread the knowledge and promote awareness of our impact on the planet. The international aspect is important, too, because we live in a global community, truly, even though that’s easy to forget sometimes. We all need to make an effort to change; our movement is only as strong as our weakest member.

Affecting change on a grand scale, like over the entirety of the United States, would be difficult no doubt, but it’d be a lot easier if everyone was trying instead of relying on one entity’s efforts. The change has to start in what you do at home, in what you buy, in what you eat, and in your heart. It’s hard to see a good reason for why you should change sometimes, even just a habit like chewing your fingernails, but seeing other people with pretty fingernails, for example, might persuade you. Be the person who’s doing good for the environment in your area, spread your knowledge and passion to those around you and we can change the world together.