This year, the yogurt maker’s dilemma took over the family’s back-to-school season. Having masterfully failed last year to reduce our plastic waste by making kids’ snacks at home (this resolution backfired due to overpackaged biscuit packets), we decided to tackle another household pollution: the yoghurt pot. The goal seemed clear to each of the four members of my tribe, ages 6 to 48: the trash can is full of flower pots. However, currently no one knows how to recycle the 15 billion polystyrene cans sold each year in France. So much so that dispensing with the container without dispensing with the content seemed to us the appropriate challenge of the moment.
It was when the price of a twelve-pot yogurt maker, 129 euros, new, was announced on an appliance site, when my 10-year-old daughter began to reason. “We will have to buy the machine, then the milk, then the electricity, it will be much more expensive than the yogurt”decree. In a moment of madness I tried to say: “Not to mention that we would first have to know if the carbon footprint of this machine is valid compared to the carbon footprint of our yogurt consumption. » My entire family scattered before I finished my prayer. I didn’t even try to hold them back. Because, how can I explain to my young children that the end of our meals is related to the climate, in particular due to the production of cow’s milk, but also due to plastic, a petroleum derivative, with which jars of yogurt? That this material is responsible for almost 3.4% of global CO₂ emissions? Emissions that will have to be divided by five in less than twenty-five years if we do not want to carbonize our common future?
Broadening the focus, I wonder how to make them understand that each of our objects and most of our actions consume energy and, therefore, emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – at a rate of 10 tons on average per French person per year. , what contributes to global warming?
“Subjects disconnected from children’s reality”
Since it took me many years to understand these causal links in detail, the obstacle seems insurmountable. I’m not the only one who stumbles upon this. “This is the question that obsesses us: these are complex, technical issues that are sometimes very disconnected from children’s reality. “We tried a lot of tools before we found the right ones.”Guilhem Papa, director of the educational center of the Climate Academy, a Parisian municipal structure that is a pioneer in education on environmental issues, especially aimed at a young audience, consoles me.
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