Trulli Tropf, a drop of water, takes the kids on a journey from their households down to the sewer system and right into the sewage treatment plant. It teaches them which things shouldn’t be flushed down the toilet and be kept out of the sewer and the treatment plant, how they can use water carefully, and how modern wastewater treatment works. The new service is now available at the city’s wastewater treatment plant run by Entsorgungsbetriebe Simmering GmbH (EbS) and was first presented to the public by Vienna City Councillor for the Environment Ulli Sima and Simmering District Governor Renate Angerer in late October.
The programme designed for pre-school children also features a short movie, which was developed together with the popular Austrian children’s writer Thomas Brezina (the movie was extracted from his kids explorer TV show Forscherexpress).
One of the highlights of the trip definitely is the peep through a microscope, where kids can watch the tiny little “workers” that are so important for efficient sewage cleaning. The journey alongside numerous treatment tanks up to a biotope gives the kids an impression of the gigantic size of one of Europe’s largest and most modern wastewater treatment plants.
The trip ends in front of a reduced-size sewage plant model, where kids are invited to get hands-on experience so they can literally grasp what a technical marvel and what great achievement for water management such a plant truly is. Every child gets a Trulli Tropf booklet, so they can show their mates back home what they have seen.
"So far experience with our environment education projects has been very positive," says City Councillor Sima, "schools, kindergartens and families are hugely interested in our programmes and I am sure that the new EULE unit – Trulli Tropf’s journey through one of Europe’s most modern sewage treatment plants – will be just as successful."
(Source: aqua press Int. 4/2006)
