ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY ANALYSIS: QUALITY LIVING OF OUR LOCAL ENVIRONMENT
1- COMPLETE THE QUESTIONNAIRE FOR UTEBO AND GIVE REASONS TO
JUSTIFY YOUR OPINIONS
2- THINK WAYS TO IMPROVE THE ENVIRONMENTAL ASPECTS MENTIONED IN
THE QUESTIONNAIRE SURVEY GREEN ISSUES
LITTER
AIR QUALITY
PUBLIC TRANSPORT
ROAD SAFETY
NOISE
POOR
NOT BAD
OK
GOOD
EXCELLENT
LEVELS
GREEN SPACES
WASTE SEPARATION
ANALYSING RESULTS A few days ago, we moved to Utebo to make an enviromental questionnaire about the town. We asked people of all ages. Some schools and highschools have also helped us, the vision of the teenagers is also important. They have got, in general terms, a more positive vision of all that surrounds us. They gave us a lot of good ideas about how we could improve our city. The results are fantastic, if we compare them to the surveys made in other cities and towns. Most people voted 4 in a scale from 1 to 5 in all the charts. The best sections have been air quality and green spaces. Seems like citizens are really happy with parks and low air pollution. The worst parts have been public transport and road safety. Our readers have sent us many comments about the buses and the road's signals. Even if Utebo is a small city, there are many dangerous zones, and traffic accidents are happening each week or month. Anyway, the results of our test are excellent! We could give Utebo an A+, just by looking how happy their residents are. Thank you for your time, we will bring more ecologic news! By Violeta Soler, 4 E.S.O.
Utebo is quite environmentally friendly but even though we do some things for making our planet better, we still aren't aware of all the damage we create every day. That bad things that we do could be replaced with other better habits. One of our biggest problems is public transport. Utebo is located in a really good place and it is really well connected with other cities because of the buses and trains. But the issue is that buses aren't comfortable enough for older people, handicapped people and parents that carry buggies... Furthermore buses are not always on time. The train as the bus have advantages and disadvantages. The man advantage is that it is very accessible for everybody and it's quite comfortable too. But people don't use this public transport more often because it's more expensive than going by bus. If train tickets were cheaper, people would think more about taking the train instead of buses or their own cars. Another solution to this problem would be building cycle lanes all arounf Utebo so people would go by bike if they need to move around the village. That would make people stop or at least reduce the times they use their cars. We also add to these problems the litter and the publir green spaces.
In Utebo, we have a great amount of parks but most of them are not in a good order. The main reasons are the rubbish that people throw to the floor and the lack of watering of the flowers and trees. With little gestures like putting more rubbish bins or hiring more gardeners so the plants could be in a better condition would improve our public green spaces. Litter is one of the most frequent causes of pollution, because even though we have lots of ways for recycling properly, we still do it in a bad way. If the town hall spent more money in recycling bins or in campaings for teaching people how to recycle, we could decrease the amount of waste we produce. As a conclusion, if we improve our environmental habits and we make people aware about all the bad consequences that will happen to our planet in the future, they will change their ways of living to other ways that are greener. In utebo we are half of the way to become an environmentally perfect village.
By Mayte Blanco & Claudia Simal, 1 Bachillerato