Private School Closes Its Doors; Basel Fasnacht Themes Focus On Environment; Food Waste Outlawed

News For 18 February 2020

The Basel private school Minerva located at St.Alban Vorstadt will cease operation at the end of this school year.  The school has been struggling with declining enrollment for many years, and management has decided it is no longer economically sustainable to continue operations.  The school offered programs for secondary years students.  There are no plans to close the Minerva school on Engelgasse which offered matura programs to its students.

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Fasnacht Carnival is about to start and young people in Basel have aligned their planned themes with Greta Thunberg's movement called Fridays for Future. Its not the first time the Fasnacht Committee has dealt with this issue. 70 of the 464 cliques registered have declared their theme to be environmentally related. Other topics represented in the Carnival are 5G, Digitization and Robotics. Other local themes included the end of the famous telephone booth in Barfusserplatz and the fire in Rheingasse. Other changes expected at this year's Fasnacht are a significant drop of participants in the carnival, and the testing of electrical floats after a few horse-drawn float incidents in prior years.

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A proposal approved in Swiss parliament could force food vendors to hand over all edible food waste to charity organisations or individuals. Food waste in major supermarkets such as Coop and Migros as well as other Swiss retailers could soon be banned in Switzerland after a motion to scrap it narrowly cleared the Public Health Committee of the Swiss parliament's Council of States. The motion, led by Martina Munz of the Social Democratic Party (SP), plans to force food retailers to hand over all edible food that would otherwise be thrown away. The food would be donated to registered charities or be made available for pick up for individuals in difficult economic circumstances. Passing by a narrow majority of six votes to five on the Committee, Munz argued that the proposal was “ethically required and absolutely ecological”. However, Swiss food retailers are against the plan, arguing it would create too much additional work for what is a relatively small percentage of food waste currently. Fortunately, while the plan still needs majority approval in parliament as a whole, it has already gained public support, as in 2015, Switzerland committed to halving food losses by 2030. Hopefully, regardless of whether the proposal develops into an executed plan, Swiss lawmakers will continue to find ways to make the country more sustainable for the future.