New Green Campaign in Turkish Schools Will Save 1.27 Million Trees a Year!
Green news from Turkey. The Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman reported on a new new book exchange campaign launched by the Ministry of Education that will be aimed at “saving millions of trees, protecting the environment and contributing to the country’s economy.”
Every year 155 million books are distributed by the Ministry to students in Turkey. Most of these books, according to the article, are thrown into the trash at the end of the year. The cost of these books to the Turkish public is more than USD 800 million annually.
The Turkish Ministry of Education understood like many others that going green is a win-win deal - benefiting the environment and saving in costs. So it changed the concept from a distribution plan to an exchange project, where books will be given to students temporarily and they will be returned at the end of the educational term. The Ministry expects to save more than 1.27 million trees every year with this project. It also estimates that it will save USD 110 million annually (50% of the paper used to publish textbooks is imported, costing $750 million annually).
This is a great move and I congratulate the Turkish Ministry of Education for it. I was also very happy to read in the article that according to the Turkish Ministry, Germany, Austria, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, England, France, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Japan, Korea and China were applying the same or a similar method at their schools. It makes so much sense (and similar in many ways to the renting concept of our friends and partners at Chegg), not to mention the educational added-value for the young students!
I’m wondering why more schools aren’t going digital with tools like Amazons ‘Kindle’ reader…they could eliminate (paper) books altogether and content could be updated immediately and automatically.
The notion that this applies to England is wrong as the equivalent of a ministry of education (The Dept of Children, Schools and Families) does not publish or distribute any school books at all. The choice of which books to use is totally with the individual schools.
In England the government tells schools what topics to teach, but not how to teach or which books to use.
Some exams (eg the GCSE exam taken at 16) do have “set books” - ie literature that is studied for the English exam, but which edition is used is a decision for the schools. The books are owned by the schools and they use the books over and over again year after year with the pupils.
Re: Danny’s comment, I don’t know why more Uni profs and school teachers don’t use companies like Chegg, linked in the post above. It looks great to me but this is the first time I’m hearing of it.