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School Curriculum

Pacific Waste Curriculum Toolkit

Thinking about our waste, and where it goes once, we have thrown it away, is often the last thing on students’ minds. This toolkit aims to provide teachers across the Pacific with resources and activities that will allow them to increase awareness of the issues surrounding waste generation and disposal, as well as enabling students to plan and implement strategies appropriate to their schools, homes, and communities to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

This toolkit has been created for teachers/educators in the Pacific region. It has been designed to complement existing curricula in the region. This curriculum package comprises of the following 9 Units:

1. What is waste?
2. Waste in my country
3. Reducing Waste
4. Waste as a Resource
5. Waste at School
6. E-Waste
7. Waste in our Waterways
8. Waste in the Ocean
9. Advocacy and Action for Change

Each unit comprises several lessons with lesson plans that outline the scope and sequence of lessons. Lessons progress by stages and subject matter. Lessons can be taught in a sequence, or lessons selected to suit your own teaching needs.

This Resource Guide provides an overview of the lessons, resources and activities, subject area, and age-group categories available to you under each unit. The activities provided have been developed with the Pacific teaching and learning context in mind and is specifically designed for each of the 15 participating PacWastePlus programme countries.

https://www.sprep.org/publications/pacific-waste-curriculum-resource-toolkit

Resource Template

21 Step Advance Recovery Fee and Deposit (ARFD) Workbook

Designing and implementing a successful, evidence-based ARFD is a multifaceted process, requiring the collection of data, undertaking meaningful stakeholder consultation, and acknowledging and incorporating differing views to make decisions to meet the specific local needs. It may feel like a daunting process. The 21-Step Pathway breaks the process down into logical, manageable steps.

This Workbook is designed to assist users through the completion of each of the 21 steps at a self-managed pace. Each step on the 21-Step Pathway is a chapter in the Workbook.

This Workbook can be used by anyone seeking to design an ARFD scheme to be set in legislation or regulation. It will be of value to by any individual or group involved in the design of an ARFD scheme, for example:

• Government representatives investigating the feasibility of an ARFD scheme or who have been tasked with developing a scheme
• A Working Group tasked with developing a scheme, or contributing to one or more steps of the 21-Step Pathway
• Private Sector or NGO representatives seeking to assist with the design of an ARFD scheme, or contributing to one or more steps of the 21-Step Pathway

The broad goals of an ARFD Scheme are to improve rates of recycling through the provision of an incentive for consumers to recycle (by providing an immediate financial reward (the refund of their “deposit”) when they drop eligible items at a depot), changing behaviour away from littering, burning, or disposing to landfill, and a self-sustainable funding source for governments/recyclers to undertake the collection, transport, processing, and export/recycling of recoverable materials (using the “fee” component which is calculated as the true cost of recycling each eligible item), providing an economically viable ability to undertake recycling/transfer activities long term, not reliant on variable government funds.

Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution - Technical Resource for Pacific Island Courtiers

Reducing Plastic Production to Achieve Climate Goals: Key Considerations for the Plastics Treaty Negotiations

Plastic production is currently on an upward trajectory and is projected to continue increasing exponentially. Global plastic polymer production doubled from 2000 to 2019, reaching 460 million tonnes (Mt) per year,1 and it is anticipated to almost triple from 2019 levels by 2050.2 This uncontrolled growth threatens the global climate, as well as human health, biodiversity, human rights, and environmental justice.

The world is already experiencing the devastating impacts of climate change, which will worsen with each fraction of a degree of warming. To minimize further temperature rise and avoid truly catastrophic climate change, GHG emissions must be reduced urgently anywhere that they can be effectively and rapidly cut. Scaling back plastic production represents one such area. The Paris Agreement, which makes no reference to fossil fuels or their petrochemical derivatives, does not ensure adequate action to address the climate impacts of plastics. It leaves the decision of where to curb emissions and by how much to States. Even if fully implemented, States’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement remain woefully inadequate to limit warming to 1.5°C.6 The global plastics treaty thus must complement the efforts of this agreement to ensure a swift and effective reduction in emissions from plastics.

Several Member States of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution have already identified the need to tackle global plastic production to address the climate crisis. This brief aims to inform the ongoing plastics treaty negotiations by compiling the current evidence on how prevailing production trends are fundamentally incompatible with achieving planetary climate goals, and provides recommendations on how obligations to address plastic production could be incorporated in the treaty to support their achievement.

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