Team:Tec-Monterrey/Forum

Environmental forum

We wanted to reach out to students on campus and warn them about contamination due to e-waste, as well as to create a habit of separating it from other residues. In order to achieve this, we organized a forum in our school with teachers and students aimed to discuss the topic of electronic waste in Monterrey.

We were very excited because the room was completely full with the more than 150 people who attended to our forum in order to know more about this important issue. As main speakers, there were people representing the government as well as our institution. However, we were very disappointed because the companies that manufacture electronic devices declined the invitation due to marketing concerns.

The forum addressed several topics about corruption and citizen participation, which were of great interest to the audience and helped us broaden our perspective on this issue. We tackled the situation about companies that produced electronics and did not want to take responsability of their own devices and make sure they are being correctly disposed of.

“The people rule the government, not the other way around” is a phrase that Magdalena Morales, Director of the Recycling Committee of the Tecnologico de Monterrey said to the students, when referring to the fact that e-waste collecting campaigns should be organized with help of the entire population and not only the government, specially here in Latin America, where more citizenship participation is required to help institutions to fully develop

In the other hand, Erasmo López, President of the Ecology Department of the Government of Monterrey, agreed that, in order to make a real change, people needed to inform themselves and demand results about improper or illegal disposal of e-waste to their respective authorities. He also emphasized that the role of all of us was to create awareness about all the health problems that the improper e-waste disposal can cause, as well as all the damage to the environment in produces.

At the end of our forum, we had the opportunity to talk with some of the assistants, and they all agreed that this forum changed their perspective about the e-waste pollution problem in our city, which is exactly what we wanted to accomplish with this event.

Brought to you by iGEM Tec-Monterrey 2016