At its essence, Skraldejagt is a laboratory for green initiative that works to achieve our quest for a cleaner environment and a climate in balance.
Since our conception, our key activity has been our monthly trash clean-ups, where we try to combine playfulness, storytelling, and community in order to make it more engaging and fun to partake in green activism.
However, as our pirate ship is growing in size, we are continuously developing new and exciting projects and initiatives to bring us forward in our journey towards our quest.
Throughout all of these projects, three main principles guide our trashure piracy.
Playfulness is one of the most underrated qualities of our modern concept of adulthood. The idea that play is for children and that adults need to be serious and responsible is a harmful attitude that, sadly, destroys a lot of beauty, productivity, and enthusiasm in our society today.
Playfulness, games, and fun are powerful tools that, if utilized correctly, can present a stronger influence over human behavior than almost any other emotion and input. At Skraldejagt, we are trying to harvest just a tiny part of that magic to change people’s relationship to trash – and through that bring about a cleaner and better planet for us all to share.
Another added benefit, in contrast to other emotions like fear, shame and pity, is that playfulness and fun often can lead to more sustainable and intrinsically motivated engagement and activism.
A concrete example of how we use playfulness is our events, where we use games and play like the ‘Skralde-bingo’ and the classic competition of ‘who can find the weirdest piece of trash’ to make the experience of picking up trash a fun and engaging experience.
Storytelling is a universal phenomenon. Humanity have always told stories and will continue to do so: from stone-age cave paintings to the Hollywood movies on the big screen.
There are no people, cultures or societies where storytelling has not played a central role. One could go so far as to say that there really is doesn’t exist anything, but storytelling, as it fundamentally is the way we become aware and make sense of our world. Your idea of and the stories you tell others about who you are – are exactly that. Stories.
The importance of these narratives is often a detail that is easily overlooked, as storytelling is just such an ingrained part of our way of thinking about and understanding the world.
One of the most important functions that our brain carries out, is to function as a kind of storytelling typewriter; developed to translate all our experiences and sensory impressions into a coherent story. And that's exactly why we love stories. Because it is the basis of how we make sense and coherence of the world around us.
We have taken this realization to heart at Skraldejagt, and we therefore work with storytelling as an integral part of almost all of our work.
A concrete example of this could be how this method directly interacts with our playful competitions in our events. Here, we ask the participants to think about the stories behind the trash. How did it end up there? What was its journey? This helps to us to connect and engage with the trash and the issues that surround it (climate and environmental), but also makes it more engaging, playful and fun.
Human beings are the most social animal. The feeling of being part of a strong community is an essential part of being a human being. Unfortunately, we live in a time where an increasing number of Danes suffer from loneliness and feeling alone. Simultaneously, we are also seeing a growing tendency - in step with urbanization, social media and globalization - that many are feeling more and more distanced from both the local communities and the distant, global level.
While it may seem paradoxical, there is nothing unnatural about it. Our local communities truly are our connection to the greater national, international and global levels. As individuals it can be enormously difficult to know and feel how to make a difference when it comes to abstract and global issues like climate change and environmental degradation. It is only through our local communities that we can reach and influence the distant, abstract and global levels.
At Skraldejagt, we therefore have an ambition to be a space where you, as an ordinary person, can become part of a local and playful community, where you can also help create changes on a larger level. From the near to the distant, we – as a community – must take our sense of influence and the ability to take action back. Let’s make a change together!