Eco Rangers encourage youth to Pikitup

Integrating environmental awareness

The Eco Rangers project, which targets Grade 3 learners, has now been launched at 200 earmarked schools within the City of Joburg municipality. The project's reach extends to peri-urban and urban areas, including both townships and towns. The ultimate objective of the project is to fully integrate the Eco Rangers into the schools' learning programmes. Pikitup has developed characters based on and aligned with the National School Curriculum (NSC). The characters are namely Litter-X (anti-littering message); Recylo (recycling message); Lynx (conservation message) and Sky (carbon footprint message).

"Young people need opportunities to engage in meaningful activities, have a voice, take responsibility for their actions, and actively participate in civic discourse. Pikitup drives development-driven resilience for all and an important quality of life, at the same time promoting the importance of not littering and focusing on the value in recycling for South Africa's economy," said Pikitup's executive director for waste minimisation strategy & programmes, Musa Jack.

Positive Youth Development

Positive Youth Development can be described as a philosophical practice that strives to enable programmes and/or communities to engage youth in a manner that promotes positive and healthy transitions from adolescence to adulthood while enabling youth to reach their full developmental potential.

"So, to entrench understanding among young children that work needs to start now in order to secure our environment in years to come, we have established as an organisation that there is a necessity of galvanising a generation of environmentally conscious ambassadors who will be critical communicators of carrying the information relating to pollution and recycling as the voice of the youth," said Jack.

From trash to treasure

There are 1200 primary schools within the City of Joburg. However, the programme will continue to be tested on a small scale of 200 pilot schools annually, in order to determine the feasibility of conducting a fully fledged programme.

As part of the 'edutainment', there will be roadshow visits to all schools, and distribution of teacher and learner guides. A competition element provides an incentive and encourages healthy competition amongst the schools, learners and teachers.

"Waste has become a resource and must be managed. Pikitup strives to continue to share information with the communities it operates in, using different platforms and providing access to a range of information, advice, support and the work that we are currently doing and finding new and creative ways of turning trash into treasure," concluded Jack.

For more information on the Waste Summit go to www.pikitup.co.za.

For further information, contact Joburg Connect on +27 (0)11 375 5555 or 0860 502874 (0860 JOBURG), or go to www.pikitup.co.za.