Sharing and Sustainability with Greenopoli, the Green Smiling Revolution
Greenopoli is a website (www.greenopoli.it), a Facebook page, and, mainly, a teaching method as well as an environmental educational program, which from December 2014 up to February 2018 has involved more than 300 schools and 50,000 students in Southern Italy. An image search on any Internet search engine by typing the word ‘Greenopoli’ can give an idea of the communicative impact of the method. There are two main key words: sharing and sustainability. Sustainability (‘Sostenibilità’ in Italian), Environment (‘Ambiente’ in Italian), Waste (‘Rifiuti’ in Italian) and Water (‘Acqua’ in Italian) are some of the main topics of the environmental educational program ‘Greenopoli’. ‘Sara’, one of the protagonists of Greenopoli, is the Italian acronym made with the initials of the four main topics.
Sustainability is linked to the future and, thus, with children, who love games, ideas, asking questions endlessly, learning, laughing, joking, etc. The environment is everything around us: we have to take care of it if we want to survive on the planet Earth. We have to change the way that we usually look at what we continue to call ‘waste’: they are materials at one end of their life cycle and can assume a new shape in a life cycle thinking perspective. Water is the blue gold of the third millennium. It is a limited resource, similarly to all the other Earth’s resources. Therefore, water has to be preserved in order to be saved for our children and for the children of our children, and so on. In the Greenopoli world, together with Sara, there are other funny characters such as Mr. Error, inspector Garbage and Mr. Rubbish, etc. All these characters, together with new green fairy tales, rap songs (‘green raps’) and games are the main tools used during the environmental education meetings managed by Greenopoli for adults and children
