Rumo primary school cooperative funds a new sewage treatment plant in Trentino, Italy; Plant completed, cost nearly €4M

“The village calls it the children’s plant”

Get to know school coops that implement sustainability actions!

In Rumo, a village of about 800 people in Val di Non, Trentino, the sewage used to go into concrete tanks installed in 1985 that did not really treat the water. Then a primary school decided to do something about it. More specifically, a school cooperative.

A School Cooperative, Cooperativa Scolastica, is a simulation of a cooperative enterprise run by the students. The members write their own statute and vote for it. They elect a president, a secretary, a treasurer, auditors. They decide in assembly what the cooperative is going to do that year, they keep the cash book, and in June they present two balance sheets, one economic and one social, and defend them. Teachers are there to facilitate but the project belongs to the cooperative members.

School cooperatives are a method of doing school, grounded on experiential, service and challenged based learning, and cooperative education pedagogies. Theya re not catered specifically to climate or environmental education and that is the interesting part. When a school cooperative takes on an environmental purpose, it is because the members decided that was the need they wanted to address with concrete actions (creating a good or a service, raising money for it): it is a democratic and collective choice, from the bottom up and not imposed.

The cooperative in Rumo is called “Un sogno smarrito”, a lost dream. Its members sampled the water. They visited treatment plants that worked, to see what one looks like. They ran experiments, held children’s councils, and asked for meetings with elected officials. They also voted to take €4,500 of their money and hand it over to the Municipality and the Autonomous Province of Trento, to support the installation of a new sewage treatment plant. Years after they started, a new treatment plant costing almost €4 million is finished. In the village people call it the children’s plant. Last November the pupils won a prize in Bolzano for a rap song they wrote about it.

Fifty kilometres south, in Besenello, another cooperative called “La scuola naturale”, the nature school, runs a teaching apiary in a wood ten minutes’ walk from the school, with a vegetable garden and an outdoor classroom. The wood, four hectares of it, was left to the community by the kindergarten cook, Rita, who died at 94. A child suggested the name: Bosc dela Rita (the forest of Rita, in the local dialect). Volunteer beekeepers manage the hives with the pupils, one of them a teacher, one a parent who is an entomologist. Firewood auctioned to parents, honey and beeswax candles the children make and sell at the Christmas concert pay for the whole thing. There is now a connected scale under a hive, so a class can follow the colony’s weight from the classroom.

In the upper secondary schools, the cooperatives look different. At Liceo Filzi in Rovereto, ROAR cooperatives came back from a study visit to Bologna, where they had seen a Library of Things, and decided to build one at home. They started with a single shelf in their classroom. At Liceo Rosmini in Trento, EcoSwap decided the people who most needed to learn about reuse were six-year-olds and made them a board game about sorting waste. At ITT Marconi, ForEner built a scale model of a renewable energy community, wired so you can see the energy move. They copied KönCeRT, a real energy cooperative in Trentino, and KönCeRT now uses the model to explain energy communities to citizens.

None of this happens without adults who are willing to be partners: parents and grandparents plough, harvest, clear woodland and put up roofs. A beekeepers’ association donated a colony. An agricultural cooperative brings milk every week so that a class can make cheese.

And it works in the other direction too. The children in Rumo acted for future generations, since a treatment plant lasts decades. Older students hand things down: the Library of Things has already been passed from one class to the next. In January 2026 parents and former members in Rumo founded an association, “Facciamoli sognare”, let them dream, to support the school cooperative bureaucratically.

Ask the teachers what they learned, and they say the same thing: stepping back. Letting the students decide, be protagonists of their own education, and practice being responsible and active citizens. Our research with the University of Bologna confirmed it.

More than 2,000 school cooperatives have been founded in Trentino since 1976, when the Federazione Trentina della Cooperazione started this work.

Give young people a real statute and a real vote, and the environment is one of the first things they choose to work for. Showing how often times students need is the space to choose, and the patience to wait while they do.

“The village calls it the children’s plant”

2.1 | Education for Climate priority

2.4 | GreenComp: sustainability competence focus

1.1 Valuing sustainability (Embodying Sustainability Values)

2.1 Systems thinking (Embracing Complexity in Sustainability)

2.2 Critical thinking (Embracing Complexity in Sustainability)

4.2 Collective action (Acting for Sustainability)

4.3 Individual initiative (Acting for Sustainability)

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