The project circular school (“Kreislaufschule”) is a creative project format for schools. Through a series of creative and activist projects, students transform their school bit by bit, resource by resource, into a sustainable closed loop school. At the end the school is awarded the “Circular School Certificate”. At the end of September, the Kreativitätsgrundschule Karlshorst was the first school to receive this award.

The concept was tested for the first time in the 2019/20 in collaboration with the Kreativitätsgrundschule Karlshorst. All 15 classes of the school were involved, each of them has designed its own campaign for the active transformation of the school.

From autumn 2019 to spring 2020, the school classes participated in three-day workshops at their school to examine and improve the resource flows of energy, water, transport, heat, plastics, repair, ReUse, canteen food and the schools’ surroundings. Due to Covid 19, we unfortunately could not complete or start some of the campaigns we had in mind such as clothing, glass, lunch box, biosphere and paper.

Despite the challenging circumstances, we took the time and energy into the new school year and finished the project after  summer break. The final project was a ten-day team effort of several classes, designing a campaign to transform their school’s surrounding into a “Klimastraße” (climate friendly street). 

After completing this last step, the project team was finally able to present the school management with the Circular School Certifikat (Kreislaufschulzertifikat) at the end of September 2020.

For its participation in this project and its efforts to promote the sustainable development goals, the school was also awarded the title “Environmental School in Europe” (Umweltschule in Europa) for the year 2020. The jury, which was made up of various members of environmental organizations and political actors in Berlin, described the project as innovative and worthy of continuation.

The Kreislaufschule project is an invention of Mifactori, Zero Waste Your Life and Circular City – Zirkuläre Stadt e.V. (Circular Berlin). All workshops (as far as we could complete and test them) are documented online and freely accessible on mifactori.de/kls. The developed workshop formats should serve as inspiration. We know that teachers also like to create their own material. Our sample instructions are supposed to show that it is possible for students not only to learn about climate protection measures in theory, but that they can really take their own school in a practical, activist and creative way and convert it step by step (resource stream for resource stream) into a sustainable, circular school.Thanks to the Berliner Projektfonds kulturelle Bildung for funding this project!