“Ideas worth spreading“. This sentence changes the way we see our environment and teaches us to see opportunities. With this sentence, TED and the TEDx Program give us the motivation to think and more importantly speak about problems as well as ideas and opportunities to change those problems in our local communities. In spirit of the TEDx Program, our class 11a hosted an own, inner class TEDx event for giving ideas how to conquer the environmental problems in Rottenburg. The lead question for this event and the complete teaching unit was “What can we do to help our environment?” Many good points where given and talked about in detail.

One important aspect that was pointed out was the unawareness of our society regarding our impact on our environment. Solving this problem and educating the people regarding our impact on the environment would tackle one problem of people always thinking that they can do nothing for the environment. Even just saying that small things in the everyday life already help the environment is completely true and should be something to live your life for.

Some good ideas for Rottenburg specifically were not buying clothes or shoes or similar things first hand but to buy them second hand or even make your own clothing. Another good idea was to open an “Environment Café” with free laptop access to encourage not buying tech on your own but to use tech that is already there and also recyclable cups, or other things.

Another good idea which affects everyone is using recycled paper. By doing so we could actually improve our health as in some new paper there are also toxic chemicals to bleach them. Another good point that was taken into consideration was that there is less water used for recycling paper then for producing new paper and the best thing is that recycled paper has the same quality as freshly new paper.

Lastly there was a very good but rather futuristic and not very practical solution for Rottenburg, the transformation to so called “jungle cities” which means planting many plants in the city like on the roofs, the walls and basically everywhere. By doing so tens of thousands of tons of CO² could be saved and you would, in a way,  give the nature back what she lost. It makes the people living in those cities more productive and creative as reported from cities in China and Switzerland.

Of course there where many more ideas, but writing them all in here exceeds the ability of us reporting about this event.

Report by Antoine Vigneux and Joel Bernhard

source of picture: https://www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/tedx-program / https://ebg-rottenburg.de