Trash, we can!

A prevalent and undeniable fact is that the lack of recycling in modern communities is harmful both for individuals and the environment alike. Focusing on the refugees’ camps, the misuse of recycling practices encumbers the quality of life. Furthermore, cause of the lack of environmental education and proper motivation, a lot of recyclable materials end up in landfills. An initiative from Lesvos Island has seen up close and assess the environmental and living conditions in the camps. They came up with an idea to develop a mobile application that communicates with a specially designed recycle bin. Recognition and reward system will provide an easy way to promote environmental education and thus resulting to cleaner camps.

Project Team

Boshra Khoshnevis

Boshra is a humanitarian architect who recently finished her masters in International Cooperation in Urban Development and Emergency Architecture. Her latest experience was an internship in Nepal on building back better after the earthquake. During the last two years, she had the chance to pursue her passion in humanitarian aid by visiting refugee camps in Germany and Greece and interview a few of their residence to become familiar with challenges in their daily life and organisations who want to help them.

Diamantina Pseftoga

Diamantina is a senior student in the environmental department of Aegean University, Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece. She is experienced in waste management and more specifically in the creation and improving of recycling systems. Her main goal is through environmental education and communication, to be able to bring local society and refugees to work together, with a view to develop Lesvos Island.

Guillaume Clatot

Guillaume is the Logistic Coordinator for OXFAM in Greece. He studied Logistics before working in the private sector for 10 years. After a trip in Asia, he decided to join the humanitarian sector. Currently on in 15th humanitarian mission, he has been working in 10 countries in various contexts such as vaccination campaigns, malnutrition treatment, or refugee camps. During his free time, he can either go hiking, play with his power kite … Or spend days in Libraries or on internet satisfying his passion for genealogy.

Irene Moriki

Irene is a fifth-year student in the environmental department of the Aegean University in Mytilene, Lesvos. She involved in recycling and the placement of a recycling system. She is a research member of Professor Skanavis’ Research Unit of Environmental Communication and Education. Irene is very passionate about exploring the world and try new experiences and also loves to organize things.

Karolos Potamianos

Karolos is physicist working on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. He studied engineering and business administration at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and physics at Purdue University, earning his PhD searching for the Higgs boson using machine learning, before joining the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and DESY (Hamburg). He currently is an Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Oxford. Karolos is an expert in large-scale data analysis, silicon pixel detectors, data acquisition and pattern recognition.

Maria Chatziantoniou

Maria is a full-time member of teaching staff in the Department of Environment at the University of the Aegean, Greece. Her research fields is environmental quality assurance methods, environmental management networks and green/sustainable entrepreneurship. Since 2014, she teaches 4th-year students environmental quality assurance and green/sustainable entrepreneurship, and gives emphasis on their practical training through their participation in the courses’ laboratories and in projects on real world problems.

Melissa Casagrande

Melissa is an entrepreneur currently designing a nurse call system. It attributes the call to the closest nurse and anticipates needs of the patient. The goal? Prevent calls, improve time to answer, and infuse empathy. As a former business development consultant, Melissa has worked with industrial sound designers to develop a better planet soundscape. Her first experience with refugees was in the US. She evaluated a program that trains former refugees to work in early learning centers and to use their traditional children’s songs on the job. Her drive is to make the world a user-friendly place.

Pieter van Trappen

Pieter is an electronics engineer by trade and a humanitarian by interest. He works at beam transfer magnets at CERN during the day and tries to apply his technical experience to help others. Disappointed by how Europe is tackling the refugee crisis he’s been helping especially recent refugees, including teaching and tutoring.

Réka Farkas

Réka is a risk management professional with a relentless passion for untangling knots and linking old with new. In her work at UNHCR she looks at countless “what ifs”, to make sure there is a plan for the unexpected. She is excited to help people move forward by speculating about the future. She has lived and worked in Hungary, Australia, Canada, Uganda and is now based in Switzerland. With a soft spot for understanding tradition, she can easily translate between people and cultures.

Saco Heijboer

Saco is both a thinker and a tinkerer. Designing and making things in which functionality and form come together and complete the whole is his goal. Product development has been his passion and profession for 30 years; he has led projects for train refurbishment, production machinery and measurement equipment, always searching for new ways to solve design problems. Saco’s education covers civil, mechanical and control engineering, sociology, art, photography and graphic design. And he still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.

Sofio Giorgadze

Sofio works as an analyst to a project – Improving Legal Safeguards for Internet Freedoms in Georgia. She has lived in Lithuania, Estonia and Spain and is a recent graduate of Tallinn University School of Digital Technologies. In her free time she enjoys working on freelance motion graphics projects. She is extremely human-friendly person and can easily find the most fun and creative solution to any problem.

Stavros Myrogiannis

Stavros is the director of the Hospitality Center for Refugees and Migrants of the municipality of Lesvos MAVROVOUNI (KARA TEPE). He is responsible for planning, strategy human resources, program manager and planning authority. He was head of the NGO Metadrasis, which escorts underaged refugees and immigrants by supervising their protection and psychological support. Since 20 years he is a special advisor of the Municipality of Lesvos for issues regarding refugees and migrants.

Sujata Majumdar

Sujata is an artist with a background in physics, photography, and ICT. She has been residing in the Netherlands since 2001, where she also works on implementing a new electronic health record at a teaching hospital. In 2014 she was awarded an ICT-Art Connect residency by the EC, for which she co-created the project Desirable Dossiers, with Healthcare ICT experts, patients and practitioners. She wanted to give people a feel for their medical data, indirectly empowering them in the choices they have in healthcare.

Thanasis Koukoulis

Thanasis is a senior student in the Department of the Environment, Aegean University. He has a passion for programming and technology in general. He is a certified Environmental instructor and his dream is to find technological means to environmentally educate others to adopt responsible environmental behaviour. He has experience in waste management, creating, improving and designing recycling systems. As a native of Lesvos island he aspires to make impact on it by improving the relationship between locals and refugees as much as the relationship between the people of the Island with the environment.

Vasili Sofiadellis

Vasili has transitioned from playing professional soccer in both Greece and South Africa’s premier leagues to a Chartered Accountant, and is currently an enthusiastic philanthropist. Sofiadellis worked at PwC performing numerous due diligence assignments whereafter he Co-Created PwC’s Strategy in the Startup Ecosystem. He’s now the CEO at Visions2Ventures, a bespoke advisory and VC firm, and the founder of Changemakers Lab, an ecosystem builder that enables social entrepreneurs and key stakeholders to cooperate and co-create impactful tech solutions that solve social challenges. He was a member of Silicon Cape’s Executive Committee, EBAN’s European Impact Investment Committee and a founding crew member of StartupBoat, focused on the current refugee crisis.

Trash, we can!

Sustainable Development Goals

Goal 06: Clean water and sanitation

Attributes

Team

pier-49

Events

THE Port Humanitarian Hackathon 2017