The challenge and our approach

On Lesvos, more than 20,000 food containers and plastic water bottles are used by the refugee population everyday. As a result, the environmental burden on the small Greek island of the Aegean Sea is enormous.

We as Movement On The Ground, try to alleviate this burden by working together with the the residents of the Olive Groves outside of Moria camp and Kara Tepe to collect the waste we see scattered around the camps. We then divide this waste into plastics and regular waste and dispose of it into the appropriate waste containers.

Our eventual goal is to create a sustainable refugee community not only from a quality of life perspective (which is part of our everyday relief operations) but also from an environmental perspective.

That's why the recycling program was launched in the Kara Tepe camp, home to 261 vulnerable families with a total population of 1,300 refugees.

We believe that our resident volunteers know best what their problems are and how to solve them and for that reason we have enabled a Camp to CampUS philosophy (you can read more about it here). With this philosophy top of mind, we ensured that our resident volunteer Azim would help to lead and pioneer this project. 

The overall goal is to spread environmental awareness and induce behavior change about reducing and recycling waste in the Kara Tepe camp and beyond.

The mission is to have recycling become part of the check in process for every new household in Kara Tepe and have the community involved and active in the process of recycling. It is crucial to maintain a long-term waste management strategy which includes the collaboration with the Municipality of Lesvos for regular pick up of the recycled materials.

Our ambition is to scale this project by not only supporting the manpower on the island with the appropriate weatherproof containers and material, but also develop educational curriculum to generate environmental awareness and engage the community through capacity building. In the future we want to spread our recycling efforts to include compostable waste in our process.