I choose to recycle

 I don’t know how much the youth in Macedonia is interested in recycling, or if they just consider it as a pure disposal, however the western countries are not like that. For example in the amazing Wrocław, Poland, where I stayed one year doing my EVS project I realized that there is a big difference between these two countries.


In my project I was working with people with psychotic disorders. Because I didn’t have any previous experience the beginning wasn’t easy at all. However I managed to understand the work. I used to work in different fields, doing different tasks, I was brainstorming and finally came up with the idea; all boxes, notebooks, books which were useless and ready to go in the garbage could be collected and taken to the recycling center in order to make some money which we can use for charity. It wasn’t easy to carry a big weight like that. Each of us carried about 7-8 kg of it in our hands. We, the volunteers and the therapists, might have carried even 15-20 kg depending on our abilities and usually we were around 10-15 people. The profit wasn’t bad for approximately 200 kg of paper. I also noticed that there was a recycling of aluminum i.e. coke cans, beer cans, bottles of different kinds of beer and vodka as well. At that point, literary all of us were engaged, we left all the trash cans empty, we stack the recycling material on the balcony, in the closets, in the basements, in order to organize ourselves and to take it to the recycling center. I also came up with the idea to clean Wrocław from the cans dispersed around the streets, which was a typical image for the weekends, especially on Saturday and Sunday morning. We divided ourselves into few groups and we were roaming the streets of Wrocław and collecting cans until the late evening. In one day we succeeded to collect 120 kg of aluminum, and the next day 170 kg, 290 kg in total to be recycled. We were 30 people divided into groups for each district, one part were the therapists from the center where I used to work, all the EVS volunteers, plus other people that joined us voluntarily. The profit was enough to supply the center for children with psychotic disorder with the necessary materials and one part of the money was donated to the zoo as well. I consider, in this way we could help here in our Republic of Macedonia, in order to have cleaner environment, better look of our surroundings and we can use the recycling process in order to donate some money to charity as well.


Milan Gjapik

 

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