Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 4
Pretty much every superhero’s goal is to clean up their city! Usually this means putting the bad guys in jail… but there are people serving like superheroes who have taken this task more literally, and are looking to clean up the environment in their city.
The superhero for this episode is Captain Planet, the star of a cheesy 90s Saturday morning cartoon, complete with green mullet hairdo! Despite low budget animation and silly villain names, this show encouraged kids to care about cleaning up their environment, and the power of doing it together.
(You can watch the intro to this retro gem HERE.)
In this episode of Serving Stories, we follow our own Planeteers from STC Amsterdam, STC Luxembourg, and STC Wavre (Belgium) on different innovative environmental initiatives to save the planet!
Innovative Environmental Volunteering
Instead of presenting today’s episode, our regular Serving Stories host, Ani Deal, is one of the featured participants in it! (Producer Shannon Deal steps in as host for this week.) For the last two years, when Ani wasn’t presenting podcasts, she worked as an Amsterdam tour guide leading visitors around the city. In this picture, she is guiding a group around Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter on an Anne Frank tour. But the tour in this episode is quite different…
Ani is leading this group of employees from the Dutch company Adyen on a Trash Tour in Vondel Park, in downtown Amsterdam. This environmental project involves two aspects: an actual tour of the park, and cleaning up trash as they find it. In their hands, volunteers hold trash bingo cards for keeping track of the types of trash they find.
As you can see in the middle picture, the Adyen team had a ton of trash to clean up… especially cigarette butts! But eventually they were able to dump all the many bits of rubbish they found with a sense of accomplishment that they had made a difference in the city environment. (Adyen’s environmental goals as a company can be found here.)
The Trash Tour is a regular environmental project of STC Amsterdam! Here are a few other corporate teams that have participated… The park is kept cleaner because of the efforts of all these multiple teams. As we always say in Serve the City: Many people doing small things together can make a big difference!
(If you want to listen to another Serving Stories episode featuring STC Amsterdam, check out Hope: Everyone’s Got Talent!)
STC Luxembourg is another community that has numerous environmental initiatives. City Leader Nicolas Duprey told us about the continuous clean-up projects they have all over the country. At right and below are Nicolas and his team on World Cleanup Day, when they also worked to gather 40 000 cigarette butts! You can see that in addition to collecting it, they have also separated the trash so it can be recycled.
STC Luxembourg partners with a local company called Shime, that has a project called MéGO! (“Megot” is the word for “cigarette butt” in French.) They collect cigarette butts—which are largely made of plastice, surprisingly, and depollute them. They then transform the butts into park benches! Incredible, right? (You can check out their project HERE.)
Below, Nicolas and his team are doing environmental awareness raising project for MéGO! including handing out free plastic ashtrays made out of recycled cigarette butts (the little round packages on the right side photo).
We also heard about an award-winning piece of trash art created by STC Luxembourg, pictured below! This whale is created out of thousands of discarded cigarette butts and plastic trash, to highlight the fact that 80% of the pollutants in our ocean environment originate on the land.
(If you want to hear another Serving Stories episode featuring STC Luxembourg (and Christmas!), listen to Respect: In the Stockings of Saint Nicholas from Season 2.)
Serve the City Wavre, just south of Brussels in Belgium, has developed a partnership with the environmental association Aer Aqua Terra, devoted to cleaning up the river Dyle. (You can read more—in French—about this association HERE.) The association provides the water gear and tools, and the volunteers provide the manpower.
Volunteers use tools to dig out refuse embedded in the river bed and sort it on a small boat that they tow along with them. Sorting the rubbish makes it much easier to recycle.
At the end of the action, volunteers bring back the refuse to be recycled. The most common objects found in the river are wet wipes that have been flushed down someone’s toilet. Few people know that the vast majority of wet wipes are made with plastic and are not biodegradable. Sewer overflows sweep these wipes into rivers, and the volunteers retrieve buckets full of them on every cleaning. (You can read more about the environmental wet wipes problem in this article.)
And now… the promised link to the intro of Captain Planet! The power is yours!
