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EcoTrack

2025-3-IT03-KA152-YOU-0003797762025Mobility of young peopleongoing
Countries: IT|LV|RO|SK|TR · Grant: €48,318
Environment and climate changeGreen skillsKey competences development

Objectives

EcoTrack was created to address the urgent need to make sustainability education both practical and engaging for young people. While issues such as climate change, overconsumption, and waste are widely discussed in society, they often remain abstract for youth, who struggle to link global processes with their personal choices. The project aims to bridge this gap by empowering participants to critically reflect on their everyday consumption habits, to experiment with simple alternatives, and to bring these practices back into their daily lives and youth work contexts. From the perspective of youth work, EcoTrack is innovative because it combines two complementary levels of learning: Monitoring of daily consumption – participants observe and record their own behaviours, making the impact of everyday choices visible. Educational and practical activities – non-formal methods such as debates, workshops, and creative labs help them understand the broader context of sustainability and test accessible alternatives. This dual approach ensures that learning is not limited to abstract concepts, but grounded in lived experience. The daily structure reflects this balance. Morning sessions are designed to be formative and reflective: debates, role plays, group games and peer discussions help participants analyse specific themes such as energy, water, food, waste, digital use and fashion. These activities connect environmental issues with social aspects like inequality, consumption patterns, and cultural habits. Facilitators guide the sessions, but young people actively shape the content through their perspectives and experiences. Afternoon sessions are practical and intensive. Participants engage in hands-on workshops such as soap making, sewing and repairing clothes, upcycling, bee-wrap production, sustainable cooking, and small gardening. Outdoor actions, like a park cleaning in Turin, provide a visible community impact. These practical activities demonstrate how the abstract topics discussed in the morning can translate into everyday sustainable habits that are affordable and enjoyable. A distinctive feature of EcoTrack is the monitoring process, which makes behaviours measurable without being competitive. Every day, participants work in intercultural groups of 5–6 people, mixing nationalities and backgrounds. Together, they weigh food portions and leftovers, measure waste generated, time water use in routines, and check energy with smart plugs. The results are recorded in simple Eco-Footprint Sheets, which act as an educational tool to stimulate reflection rather than as scientific data. This process not only raises awareness of individual behaviours but also fosters intercultural dialogue: comparing habits across countries highlights cultural differences and common challenges, making the learning richer and more personal. All these experiences will be collected and consolidated in the Toolkit Daily Choices, a co-created resource that gathers the monitoring methods, creative workshops, and sustainable practices tested during the exchange. Unlike a traditional manual, it is written by participants themselves, making it authentic, youth-friendly and easily transferable to other groups, schools, and NGOs. The main objectives of EcoTrack are: Raise awareness among young Europeans of how their daily choices in energy, water, food, waste, digital use, and clothing affect the environment and society. Provide practical tools for participants and youth workers, especially the Toolkit Daily Choices, to replicate and disseminate practices at local level. Promote sustainable habits through experiential learning, peer-to-peer exchange, and intercultural collaboration. Develop competences such as ecological literacy, teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, and intercultural communication, in line with Youthpass. Foster inclusion by ensuring that young people with fewer opportunities can participate fully, showing that sustainability is accessible to all. Encourage intercultural dialogue by creating a safe space where different cultural perspectives on consumption and sustainability are shared. Support youth work innovation by testing new methods that combine monitoring, reflection, and practical workshops, and by producing resources that can be reused in future projects. In this way, EcoTrack contributes to the Erasmus+ priorities on environment, climate change and inclusion. It offers not abstract theory but a lived intercultural experience: young people monitor their choices, compare them across cultures, and discover practical ways to act more sustainably. From the perspective of youth work, the project strengthens the role of youth exchanges as laboratories for empowerment, ecological awareness, and intercultural solidarity.

Project partners (5)