It is no longer a secret that all over our planet is confronting with a climate changing, the main cause being the pollution with all its forms. This is a problematic situation that concerns all of us because it has negative effects on our health and on the health of this planet. We observed that our first reaction was to blame the authorities and the governments for not taking clear measures to reduce the pollution. Analyzing the situation, we understood that we are the first that we need to take action. Looking more closely, in our homes and school yards, we saw that the amount of waste that we produce is huge.

 The ”Eco-education” project unites six European schools, three special schools from Romania, Poland and Turkey and three regular schools from Italy, Portugal and Greece, from these two have integrated students with special needs. This partnership emerged from the need to make a change in our teaching methods to be more Eco-friendly, in our students and parents’ behavior to be more aware about the environment in which they live in and how they can protect it and also in our community vision to see we are present and active so more can take our example. For this we will involve from all partner schools about 300 students with special needs and regular students, 300 parents, 60 teachers and at least 300 people from our communities gathering students and teachers from other schools, NGO’s representatives, local authorities and specialists in the field. They will be involved in debates and workshops about reducing, reusing and recycling the waste, walks/trips for photographic sessions of the polluted or defaced areas, debates to identify solutions for the negative aspects, didactic activities and micro-projects oh how we can reuse paper, plastic, electronics and organic wastes, creation of didactic and non-didactic materials from waste, creation of an Eco-space inside each school, cleaning actions in the school proximity polluted areas, tree planting or marches with banners for the sea/forest protection and two conferences on environment issues and educational solutions, all these organized in 6 big activities called : “This is it!”, “Now We know!”, “What can we do?”, “From us back to us!”, “Let’s do it, Europe!” and “Pay forward!”. Part of the students and teachers involved in the project’s activities will participate in 6 short-term exchanges of groups of pupils and 2 short-term joint staff training events. To ensure a good management of the project, each partner will establish a team work, will plan in detail all activities and put clear deadlines, implement and evaluate each activity, communicate and disseminate the results. Our results will be: flyers and posters, methods to prevent and control the negative aspects, lesson plans, models of micro ecological projects, an e-Book, a digital story, an Info Eco-App, a board game, didactic items and non-didactic items created from waste, one Eco pedagogical corner or garden, at least one civic action developed at community level, video presentations and articles about good practices in Eco-education, logo of the project, an eTwinning page of the project, video of the project and a green school brochure. We expect our project to have a high impact upon the participants and also a significant impact on the participant schools and upon the close environment. All participants will have increased civic engagement and participation due to their initiatives in the community. Teachers will have more confidence and better skills in environmental education and will be motivated to bring the environment to their day to day lessons, no matter the curricular area. Students will have cultural and civic awareness during the transnational mobility and will discover common values no matter the nationality or cultural background. Students with or without special needs will work together having the same goal, increasing their self-esteem and their trust of feeling an important and valuable part of the community. Schools will be motivated to become green schools and the close environment will benefit of important improvements due to our project’s actions and activities. Continuing our measures and methods to reduce waste used during the project and afterwards, giving good examples in our communities and to our colleagues from education field all over the world, the long-term benefits will be on the environment. Although at the macro level our actions might look small, we know that for our schools these actions will bring significant improvements in our beneficiaries’ attitude, in our way of making education and in our care towards nature. Our believe is that we all need to leave our green footprints for our world to become a better place.