Keeping the FAU tidy – Plogging challenge
In the week from July 13 to July 17, 2020, the Green Office trialled a plogging challenge. At the time, it was expected that not many people would be able to take part due to the pandemic. But we still gave it a try as best as we could. Plogging, a combination of plocka (Swedish for “pick up”) and jogging, is about collecting trash, doing sport and doing something good for the environment while moving through the city – or university grounds. At the end of the week, the team recorded the trash collected and the kilometers completed and gathered photographs of the event.
The Denk Nachhaltig e.V. group from Ingolstadt challenged us to work together with other universities to take action and clean up their campuses. In addition to conventional packaging waste, a particularly large number of disposable masks were collected, which, due to their synthetic fibers, take about 450 years to decompose in nature. During the trial, almost 60 liters of trash were collected in a parking lot within an hour, which is quite amazing for a comparatively clean city like Erlangen. In addition to countless cigarette butts and over 20 disposable masks, a plastic hub cap and a digital receiver were also found. 
Plastics have a significant impact on the global climate problem. If production of plastics is not reduced and transformed, around 56 gigatons of CO2 could be generated by 2050, according to calculations by the Center for International Environmental Law. It is also only a matter of time before the plastic waste reaches the oceans via the air and rivers. In order to keep FAU’s campus completely clean and prevent dangerous pollutants from entering the environment, we want to firmly anchor the Plogging Challenge among our climate events in the future. We are also planning to partner with the city of Erlangen in the annual event “Clean City – Clean Forest – Clean Waters”. Let’s do more together for climate action at our university and in our city and set a positive example. We are looking forward to the next round.
In 2021, we participated in the Erlangen campaign and collected trash in two areas. The northern area extended from the Schlossgarten via the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine to the street at the Schwabachanlage in the north. The southern area that was assigned to us extended from the university sports grounds on Gebbertstraße along Sebaldusstraße/Staudstraße to Kurt Schumacher Straße.
This time, the Green Office split into teams that met at different times: from 8 am to 10 am and from 4 pm to 6 pm. We found that the later tour was particularly beneficial as we met many people who wanted to help us gather trash. All in all, thanks to the diligent help of the students from the Tandem Project or individual students who were finally able to meet their friends again, a lot of trash was collected. The team in the city center has the sad record of 23 garbage bags with about 500 liters of garbage. The southern team collected 15 garbage bags with just under 300 liters of garbage. This year, cigarette butts were again the most common trash, and these were mainly found in the vicinity of garbage cans. Many bits of metal were especially prevalent this time, as well as FFP2 and medical masks. Thank you to all participants for helping us rid our campus of garbage and giving everyone a cleaner university.