“OUROBOROS”
We are going to produce soaps from used cooking oil!
Within the scope of our project and as a way to celebrate one of the various European mobilities at Escola Secundária José Saramago – Mafra, in early January of 2020 we looked for a way of giving a gift to our foreign colleagues. In the student-teacher partnership and vice versa, the idea of producing ecological soaps came up. As the purpose of our initiative in this project is to discover sustainable solutions for our cities, why not start this change within our homes?
Later on, we would have to materialize our idea. After some research by our Physics and Chemistry teacher, Marília Peres, to whom we thank the contribution in all the work, we obtained a “guiding thread” of how we should proceed. One afternoon, with the help of the teacher and other school colleagues, we “got our hands dirty” and effectively tested how we were going to produce our soaps. To implement the activity, we put on our lab coats and went to the Chemistry Laboratory.
Here is the laboratory procedure:
Producing soaps from used cooking oil.pdf
With the soaps in our hands, the results were very satisfactory: we obtained wonderful smelly soaps!...
Soon after, we thought that this project needed identity, that is, a name, but it could not be any name. So, it occurred to us “Ouroboros” since it designates a serpent that bites its own tail forming a perpetual circle that is in constant renewal which is what sustainability is all about! A circle that is always in motion, since we reuse what is already old and assign new meanings to the things we do not use.
We asked our colleagues of the Professional Course of Multimedia to take care of the branding of our Ouroboros. Seven proposals were presented and now we will have to select the best Ouroboros branding proposal.
Given the COVID-19 Pandemic situation in which we find ourselves and with the teaching activities suspended, we can no longer produce our Ouroboros, but the will is not lacking! We hope that, in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to return to our Erasmus+ working group at our school and prepare more of these wonderful soaps to be distributed to our European colleagues during the next mobilities.
Rodrigo Lourenço and Afonso Cardoso,
11th grade students at Escola Secundária José Saramago, Mafra
May 2020
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In early January 2021, we resumed production of our handmade eco-friendly soaps.
For the Ouroboros branding, the best proposals, created last year, were selected and an online voting poll created. The voting took place on the 28th of January; 20 members of the project voted and the design for the Ouroboros branding got 55% of the votes.
The video with the Ouroboros story created, during the first quarter of 2021, by a group of students from the project, can de seen HERE!