The #SIBURCAMP basketball camp hosted a first-ever Sustainable Development Day
6 july 2022
On July 5, the camp’s young participants attended a series of classes dedicated to diversity, inclusivity, and ecology, took part in several thematic relay races and a trivia game, and were given a tour of a state-of-the-art waste sorting facility.
The camp’s training shift took place on June 26 through July 16 at the More Sporta facility in Nizhegorodskaya Oblast. It was attended by 54 fledgling basketball players who had won the regional qualifying stage of the Basketball School project’s sixth season, and by their coaches. This year’s selection rounds were held in the spring in 9 of the cities where SIBUR has operations including Dzerzhinsk, Tomsk, Tyumen, Tobolsk, Perm, Voronezh, Nizhnevartovsk, Blagoveshchensk, and Kazan. This year’s session was the first one to also accept junior female players who had successfully passed the selection.
On our Sustainable Development Day at SIBURCAMP, we held a class on diversity and inclusion. The teams that are most likely to succeed are the ones made up of players with a broad range of diverse skills. It is what makes people different that becomes a resource for attaining a common goal. This is the rule that is equally applicable to sports, life, and business, Ksenia Karpenko, SIBUR's business partner, noted discussing the camp’s results.
SIBUR is keen to make all the key foci of its ESG strategy an integral part of all its activities, including projects that promote sports. This gives us the ability to communicate the principles of sustainable development to a broad group of fans and athletes, and to promote a considerate attitude to the environment by implementing joint environmental initiatives together with our partners from the world of sports, Maxim Remchukov, Director of Sustainable Development at SIBUR, commented.
Speaking about examples of such cooperation, the speaker made note of a project to fabricate basketballs out of recycled plastic, a series of awareness-raising and educational campaigns for fans, the proposal to use environmental indicators for evaluating basketball clubs working together with the VTB United League, as well as projects focusing on separate collection of plastics for subsequent recycling that will be implemented jointly with the Russian Football Union and major running events.
The day's agenda included a tour of the MAG-1 waste sorting facility. The PET plastic that gets sorted here goes on to several recycling plants. One of these facilities is Fantastik Plastic, a partner of SIBUR that ships chopped and washed PET bottles to a SIBUR enterprise in Bashkortostan to produce recycled polymer pellets known as Vivilen rPET. In the course of the tour, the young basketball players were able to observe the way waste sorting is done at one of the most advanced facilities of its kind in Russia while also learning that separate waste collection in an everyday life is equally important as it allows to increase the share of recyclable waste and reduce its adverse impact on the environment.
Here are some of the excerpts from the feedback offered by #SIBURCAMP’s participants:
It was exciting to be able to learn something new. Many thanks to the organizers for putting together such programs that are not what you commonly expect to see at a sports camp. I think that many of us will now think hard about how to care for our environment in a more responsible manner, Timur Khayreev, Kazan.
The most memorable events for me included the eco-relay race that was attended by such basketball stars as Maria Stepanova, Evgeny Baburin and others, and, of course, a tour of the recycling factory. Now I know how to properly sort waste, and I will be trying to do it at home, Irina Zalatova, Tobolsk.
Sergey Bykov, SIBUR’s Investment Support and Social Policy Manager, leader of the Basketball School project: The Sustainable Development Day allowed us to expand the camp’s sports program. We chose the educational and game-like format to tell the young athletes about SIBUR's expertise in the field of sustainable development. We hope that this will become yet another of #SIBURCAMP’s traditions, allowing its participants to acquire even more fresh and useful knowledge along with the athletic experience they are normally getting here.
#SIBURCAMP is part of Basketball School, SIBUR's nation-wide project carried out in support of youth basketball in Russia. Under the guidance of their experienced mentors and coaches, budding athletes work on building up their sports skills while their coaches expand their expertise in conducting lectures and master classes. The camp’s curriculum includes basketball training sessions and games, general fitness workouts, fascinating guided tours, bespoke educational lectures, as well as meetings with interesting people representing the world of sports and beyond.