Practice makes perfect – playfully educating children on the world of plastics

In Germany, the demand for skilled workers in the so-called STEM professions is steadily increasing – while the enthusiasm of young people for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is waning. The plastics industry is also feeling the effects of this. PlasticsEurope's declared goal is therefore to promote STEM education in schools – with a textbook, digital offerings and an experiment set.

In an interview with K-MAG, Tanja Rühl talks about "Kunos coole Kunststoffkiste" (Olly's cool Box of Plastics), how PlasticsEurope wants to use it to give children an understanding of plastics and the extent to which plastics can help protect the climate.

With "Kunos coole Kunststoffkiste" you want to introduce young people to the subject of plastics. How did the idea come about? Who is the offer aimed at?

Tanja Rühl: Educational work and especially teaching materials have a long tradition among German plastics producers. However, with the poor performance of German students in the 2000 PISA study, it became clear to us that it was too late to introduce young people to science until the beginning of the 7th grade. Therefore, in cooperation with Prof. Gisela Lück, we decided to expand our educational program to include the primary grades.

What is contained in the box? How do you work with it?

Rühl: The world of children is surrounded by plastics more than ever. From toys to smartphones to (sports) clothing. Knowledge about the polymer material, however, is lagging far behind. The suitcase therefore contains five experiments that look at and raise awareness of completely different areas of application for plastics.

In order to be able to use the suitcase optimally, we offer seminars for teachers, for example, in cooperation with other partners. During the pandemic, we digitized this offering. Basically, however, "Kuno" is designed in such a way that teachers can also familiarize themselves with the experiments themselves via the videos on our Kuno website.

In class, the children work through the experiments in a kind of station learning, whereby it is entirely up to the teachers whether they want to carry out all the experiments at once or one experiment every week. The content of the experiments is also based on the curriculum; for example, Experiment 5 "Pocket-sized sewage treatment plant" can be optimally linked to the topic of "Water" in Class 3 or 4.

What has been the response so far?

Rühl: Great. We are currently celebrating 20 years of Kuno. During this time, we have distributed over 15,000 cases to German elementary schools, most of them through training courses. The number of free refill sets sent out also clearly shows us that we are on the right track in STEM education with Kuno.

What future goals are you pursuing with the plastic box or in STEM education for young people in general?

Rühl: Reawakening young people's interest in science-oriented subjects and thus counteracting the shortage of skilled workers in the long term – these are the goals we have set ourselves. Ultimately, we want the children to find out for themselves how much fun experimenting can be. And at the end of the day, of course, we also want to counter the current rather negative public perception of plastics with something positive.

As you say, plastics have an image problem in times of climate change. How do you think this can be counteracted? Where do you see your role in this?

Rühl: Actually, it's more a question of more environmental protection. After all, plastics can be produced with the use of few resources, and they are also lightweight, so they cause much lower emissions during transport than other materials, and therefore even have a climate-protecting effect. What is critical is the use of fossil raw materials such as crude oil. That's why we are relying more and more on alternative raw materials such as biomass or even CO₂, which we capture from the air and use, for example, in the production of sports floors, mattresses or running shoes.

Our image problem stems primarily from plastic waste on the streets, in parks or in rivers. Yet plastic is actually far too valuable to be carelessly thrown away and, in the worst case, end up in nature. That's why we're taking action against this with all our strength and conviction: We want the landfilling of plastics to be banned throughout Europe and advocate a massive reduction in single-use plastic products. We're also pushing for better collection and sorting systems to recycle many more plastics than we do now. And wherever possible, we design our products so that they are ideally made of only one plastic and can be easily recycled after use. In a nutshell: We are focusing on a new way of doing business in which we use reusable plastics for a long time and then return them to the cycle.

What advice would you like to give to young people who are interested in training or studying in the plastics sector?

Rühl: I can only explicitly encourage people to enter the plastics industry. It is an innovative industry that plays an important role in all the major issues of the future, be it in mobility, energy supply or climate protection, etcetera. As a result, it will continue to be a secure employer in the future. Likewise, the professions are incredibly diverse: from product designer to chemical engineer to process mechanic, to name just a few. And what other industry can claim to offer attractive jobs from the North German Plain to the Swabian Alb?