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Waste Not, Want Not: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Starts With YOU
Series: HOT TOPICS
Presenter: Jennifer Hackett
Target Audience: Students in grades 5 -12
Date: April 22, 2008 (EARTH DAY, 2008)
For many of today's students, recycling is a way of life. But that doesn't mean students understand why we recycle. More than ever, that's important for students to know! Teaching students how to help clean up the planet and live responsibly is not just an opportunity, but a necessity.
My grandmother and mother taught me “'use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”. Living GREEN is an attitude, a lifestyle, and a choice to find and promote the best alternatives that support healthier home, school, business, and community environments.
Recycling enables ALL students to get involved, regardless of their socioeconomic status or their abilities, and to have an equal opportunity to protect and feel good about the environment. Students can see the fruits of their efforts pay off in environmental protection.
OBJECTIVES:
Students will:
- Think of lifestyle changes that would produce less waste.
- Understand the elements that make up an ecosystem.
- Identify the importance of recycling along with the 3 R’s of recycling: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
- Learn specific examples of ways we can reduce, reuse, and recycle waste.
NATIONAL STANDARDS
National Academy of Sciences
The National Science Education Standards provide guidelines for teaching science as well as a coherent vision of what it means to be scientifically literate for students in grades K-12. To view the standards, visit this Web site: http://books.nap.edu/html/nses/html/overview.html#content.
This lesson plan addresses the following national standards:
- Science as Inquiry: Understanding about scientific inquiry
- Life Science: organisms and environments
- Science in Personal and Social Perspectives: Changes in environments
- Science: Life Sciences – Understands relationships among organisms and their physical environment
- Nature of Science – Understands the nature of scientific inquiry
- Life Science: Interdependence of organisms; Behavior of organisms
Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL)
McREL's Content Knowledge: A Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks for K–12 Education addresses 14 content areas. To view the standards and benchmarks, visit http://www.mcrel.org/compendium/browse.asp.
This lesson plan addresses the following national standards:
- Language Arts: Viewing – Uses viewing skills and strategies to understand and interpret visual media
- Science: Life Science — Understands relationships among organisms and their physical environment
- Health: Knows environmental and external factors that affect individual and community health
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PRE-ACTIVITIES:
I.A great place to go to start the learning process is Recycle City, a Web site from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Go to (http://www.epa.gov/recyclecity/. By clicking different sections of the site's clickable map, students learn how Dumptown was transformed into Recycle City.
II. Focus: To help students gain an appreciation for the earth we live on using an edible object, the apple.
- Give each student an apple and a butter knife. Explain to the class that today they will be learning a valuable lesson about earth. Tell them that the apple is going to represent our earth.
2. Instruct students to cut their apple into fourths. Explain that three of the pieces would represent the oceans of the world. One-fourth of the apple would represent earth's land area. The core of the apple represents the core of the earth. [Save the apple core for one of the post activities].
3. Cut the earth's land area (1/4 of the apple) in half. You are now showing 1/8 of the apple. People cannot live in this area because it is polar, desert, swamp, rocky mountain, etc. The other 1/8 would represent where people live.
4. Cut the 1/8 piece (representing where people live) into four pieces. Three of the four 1/32 would represent areas where it is too rocky, cold, hot, poor soil, buildings, roads, etc.
5. Hold up the last 1/32 piece. Carefully cut the peeling off. The peeling would represent an area from the surface of the earth to a depth of 5 feet where there is soil that we can grow food.
6. Lead a discussion with the class about the comparatively small area we have on earth where food can be grown. Compare this to the number of people on the earth that have to be fed.
7. Allow students to predict what they think could happen if this area failed to provide for all of earth's inhabitants. Ask students what they are doing to care for this area. Is there a need to be concerned about this area?
III.Students should read 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save The Earth by The EarthWorks Group. Have each small group of students choose one of the chapters to share with the class. Encourage the use of posters, graphs, and other visuals as teaching tools.
IV. Ask each group of students to examine the contents of a plastic bag of garbage that is handed to them. Ask the groups to identify the various types of waste materials in the sack. Sort and categorize the waste materials as paper products, glass, aluminum, tin, plastics, or cardboard.
V, Stress litter prevention. Assign students to make a quick trip (15 minutes) around the school campus to pick up litter. Discuss how litter affects a whole ecosystem by hurting living things.
VI. Discuss the issue of excess packaging and what each of us can do about it.
VOCABULARY:
Ecology: study of how organisms relate to each other and their environments
Pollution: harmful or poisonous substances that dirty the air, water, or land
Recycle: to process old, used items in order that the material can be used to make new products. so that additional natural resources do not have to be used.
Examples of things that are often recycled are glass, plastic, newspapers, aluminum cans, used motor oil, and batteries.
Natural resource: Materials found in nature that are useful or necessary for people to live. Water, forests, and minerals are natural resources.
Landfill: A dump where garbage is covered with dirt to hide it and to cut down on flies and odor.
Compost: A mixture for fertilizing land, especially one containing decomposed plant material.
LESSON DESCRIPTION:
Every product we use, from a CD to a plastic bag, has a life cycle. It’s produced, used, and eventually disposed of. Because of this, our purchases can have real impacts on the health of our planet and its people, even when we can’t directly see or feel them. Second, each of us has an opportunity to improve the health of the environment through our own buying habits. This videoconference will feature many examples of ways we can “green” our lifestyle.
Give your students a challenge. Challenge your students to take at least three actions that will change the way they buy, use, or dispose of their accumulations (“stuff”) or that encourage society at large to be more environmentally responsible.
Here is a classroom activity to demonstrate student actions that generate school lunch trash. Students will then examine ways which generate less lunch trash.
Materials:
LUNCH A
Lunch box containing a thermos of drink, a piece of fruit such as an apple, pear or plum, a sandwich container, chips and/or carrots and celery sticks in a reusable plastic container, napkin.
LUNCH B
Paper bag containing juice carton, sandwich wrapped in plastic wrap, bag of chips, Twinkie or fruit pie, banana, carrots or celery sticks wrapped in plastic wrap, and a pudding cup, napkin and spoon.
Procedure:
- Examine the contents of each lunch. Discuss and estimate the amount of trash that will be generated by each lunch.
- Record your estimates on a student worksheet.
- Allow students to eat the food.
- Weigh the non-recyclable/ reusable waste from each lunch.
- Record your results on the student worksheet.
Concluding Questions:
- Which lunch produced less trash?
- Why did one lunch produce more trash than the other?
- How might you alter your lunch so that it produces less trash?
This videoconference will discuss ways for all of us to reduce, reuse, and recycle as well as address a wide variety of behaviors that impact the environment.
Jennifer Hackett will discuss many more ways to reduce our ecological footprint, and save us money as we live happier and healthier lives.
Here is THE PLAN:
Reduce: Avoid buying what you don't need and when you or your parents buy an appliance or vehicle, spend the money up front for an energy efficient model.
Re-use: Buy used stuff and wring the last drop of usefulness out of most everything you own.
Recycle: Avoid filling up landfill space; recycle aluminum, plastic, paper
glass, and cardboard as well as tires, batteries and used motor oil.
What else can you do?
- BUY products with a high recycled content, even if they cost a little more.
- Reduce the volume of packaging you buy, reuse what you can, and recycle the rest.
- Tell the clerk "I don't need a bag".
- Use your own reusable canvas bag or backpack at the store.
- Buy quality products and keep them for a lifetime.
- Use composting. A compost is recycled plant matter. Food and yard scraps placed in a bin are converted into valuable garden soil in a matter of weeks. Composting can easily reduce by half the volume of material a household sends to a landfill.
POST-ACTIVITIES:
I. Reverse Garden
Tell the class you would like them to experiment with a reverse garden. Give each student (or small group of students) a paper egg-carton. In different sections of the carton place the following items: glass (a marble works well); peanut; piece of apple core left from the pre- activity; small piece of aluminum foil; paper; and plastic. Cover each item with soil.
Have students predict what will happen if they bury their treasure for the next 30 days. Encourage students to take the egg carton home, bury it in their yard, and keep that area of the yard wet for 30 days. You may have an area on the school ground where the experiment could be done. After 30 days, have students dig up their buried treasure to check the accuracy of their predictions.
II. Inventory the waste produced by your classroom, cafeteria, and other school areas.
What is being recycled? What disposable materials could be replaced by something reusable? (Glass jars could replace plastic or styrofoam containers; wax paper bags could replace plastic; cloth rags could replace paper towels.)
Ask each group to determine the types of wastes generated in special rooms of the school: arts and crafts, school cafeteria, the office, maintenance room, and their classroom. Are these wastes handled in the same manner? Determine what other wastes are generated by the school. Where do these wastes go?
III.Students will be assigned to write public service announcements for television to persuade people not to litter. Share commercials with the class.
RESOURCES and EXTENSIONS:
- Solid Waste and Recycling from King County Kids Web
http://www.metrokc.gov/dnr/kidsweb/solid_waste_main.htm
Website Questions/Comments
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Email: mike.majett@Vanderbilt.edu
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