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News from Altenburg

Altenburg:

Out of the newspaper of Altenburg

 

 

Consumption of Drinking Water

New Task: We investigate a weekly cycle and an annual cycle. We watch the consumption of drinking water for 14 days and over a whole year. To collect the results, there are PDF files for printing and distributing to the students. We start the investigations in February or March. The files are in our Dropbox in the folder "Drinking_Water". In order to record the results we use an Excel spreadsheets.
We also talk about using drinking water, how the consumption can be reduced and how to use a water meter to get the result in m³ or l.

 

 

Camera to document our Projects

For our project we have ordered a WiFi Action-Camcorder with Full HD Video Resolution 1080p and 14 Megapixel Photocamera for each school. It's a actioncam from Rollei which is able to make videos and still images in high quality without focus and flash in normal light. The camera also can be used with remote control or via WiFi per smartphone and is fully waterproof by using the casing.
 
Per USB you can download the videos and pictures or you can show them per HDMI on a screen. We want to use it for documentation of our works in school and also on our events. After some instructions it is easy to handle. So before we send the cameras to your schools, I try to make some instructions to invite you and your students in handling.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Comenius Project - Friedrichgymnasium Altenburg

What we have done so far

 
First we were introduced in the topic “Water- food number1” in subjects like chemistry, biology, physics, geography, ethics and computer science. In our first “Comenius lesson”, we collected information about different kinds of water for example mineral water, streams, rivers, fresh water and salt water. We also answered the question for what do you use all these kinds of water? We read three texts that we got from the teachers and so we found out more about questions like “How to save water?”. And where are the problems? After finding out our class filled out a quiz. At the end of this topic we investigated our own water requirement. 
 
The making of a “Waterfootprint” was the next we had to do. The whole class does this in our computer science lesson. These are the results of our private ecologically footprint: Our class needed 2.4 resources as much as the earth provides to us.
 
  
 
Nevertheless, our topic doesn´t end. We look forward to meeting all the others who join in this project next year. 
 
Lara + Anna-Lena
 
 

Waterfootprint


Please calculate the Waterfoodprint with your students for our project "EuroWater".

Your individual water footprint is equal to the water required to produce the goods and services consumed by you.

Please use it to discuss the water consumption.

 

 

Why bothering about your water footprint?

Freshwater is a scarce resource; its annual availability is limited and demand is growing. The water footprint of humanity has exceeded sustainable levels at several places and is unequally distributed among people. There are many spots in the world where serious water depletion or pollution takes place: rivers running dry, dropping lake and groundwater levels and endangered species because of contaminated water. The water footprint refers to the volumes of water consumption and pollution that are ‘behind’ your daily consumption. 
 

Water footprint reduction at home

As a consumer, you can reduce your ‘direct water footprint’ (home water use) by installing water saving toilets, applying a water-saving showerhead, closing the tap during teeth brushing, using less water in the garden and by not disposing medicines, paints or other pollutants through the sink.
 

Save water in the supermarket

Your ‘indirect water footprint’ – the water consumption and pollution behind all the goods you buy – is much larger than your direct water footprint at home. You have basically two options to reduce your indirect water footprint. One option is to substitute a consumer product that has a large water footprint by a different type of product that has a smaller footprint. Examples: eat less meat or become vegetarian, drink tea instead of coffee, or even better drink plain water. And replacing cotton clothes by clothes from artificial fibre saves a lot of water.

But this approach has limitations, because you may find it difficult to drastically change your consumption pattern. What still remains, however: you can select the cotton, beef or coffee that has a relatively low water footprint or that has its footprint in an area that doesn’t have high water scarcity. This requires that retailers provide you with proper information to make such choices. In this respect, ask product transparency from businesses and regulation from governments!

 

Here the link to the calculator: http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/YourWaterFootprint

 

Committee Europe 2013