It's no secret that what you teach kids sticks with them as they get older, so what if we added recycling as a unit in primary school? Not only what it is, but what can and cannot be recycled. Through proper education we hope to help the problem that America has with recycling: too much landfill at the recycling plants and enough people recycling.
Being a camp counselor, I have experienced firsthand then when you start to teach children good habits at a young age, they continue those habits throughout their life as they get older and solidify them as normal habits. For example, the way teachers have seared the "golden rule" into every child's head "treat others the way you want to be treated" is something many of us in college still think about. Same way we were taught how to keep a plant alive and how to do basic math. What if we were taught in school the importance of recycling?
Many school DO teach about recycling and what it is, and maybe why it's important, but they don't teach people WHAT to recycle, and many underfunded schools don't teach about it at all of maybe for 15 minutes during an environmental unit. Our goals is to get teachers to go in depth every year and remind kids until it becomes habit that bottles, cans, and paper go in the recycling and wrappers and food go into the garbage can.
I was shocked when I got to college and realized that most people didn't care about recycling and were too lazy to do it because they didn't ever learn the importance or what goes where. My roommates now ask me before they throw anything away if it can be recycled, because I have been teaching them and being very persistent about the benefits and importance. It's still shocking that they don't know toilet paper rolls are recyclable and chip bags are not. However, I've done my part to educate them and I have seen drastic improvement. If we applied this on a country-wide scale, the outcome could be enormous!
Without recycling, the Earth would suffer from garbage pile ups, increase in landfills, increase in greenhouse gasses, fossil fuels would disappear at a faster rate, and our natural resources would diminish. If we are able to recycle even more, we can create the opposite of these effects!
Each year for the last 30 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has collected and reported information on the amount of municipal solid waste Americans generate to benchmark the success of existing waste reduction and recycling programs. The 2014 report states that residents produced 258 million short tons of municipal solid waste, with recycled and composted materials representing 34.6 percent of that amount or 89 million tons. About 33 million tons underwent combustion with energy recovery – turning the waste into usable energy for fuel, heat and electricity. A little more than half, or 136 million tons went to landfills. Without recycling and combustion with energy recovery, all 258 million tons would have filled landfills and begun to pile up.
The Earth has undergone multiple climate changes, all part of its natural processes and evolution through many millions of years. But since the Industrial Revolution and the burning of fossil fuels, that has changed. Humans now represent the main contributors to the planet's warming, mostly because of the greenhouse gases – methane and carbon dioxide for the most part – added to the atmosphere from industries, electricity consumption, exhaust from cars and much more. Recycling and composting have reduced how much greenhouse gas was released.
Fossil fuels come from the fossilized remains of small water creatures and plant matter that existed during the Carboniferous Period, which occurred about 359 to 299 million years ago. Current estimates are that by 2050 or thereabouts, the reserve won't exist anymore. Manufacturers use fossil fuels to make nylon and plastics, and if humans don't continue to recycle, this energy source may disappear altogether, sooner rather than later. By recycling plastics, the need for fossil fuels gets reduced, at least in the manufacturing sector where it is a material resource.
In 2013, for example, recycling efforts prevented 87.2 million tons of waste from going into landfills, which also kept 186 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from polluting the atmosphere even more, and is the equivalent of removing more than 39 million cars from highways and roads for an entire year. If people took the time to compost food and yard waste, recycle paper, metals and electronics, it would go a long way to preserving Earth's natural resources and help slow climate warming.
https://sciencing.com/a-new-form-of-recycling-creating-materials-that-self-destruct-13559038.html
A teacher was very intrigued when she noticed her students putting recyclables in the garbage, and found an opportunity to teach and bring her students together for something important.
"My school has always recycled—we all have recycling bins in our classrooms. Yet, I noticed that students would often throw recyclable materials into the garbage. It occurred to me that if students in my classroom didn’t always recycle the correct way, then other students were probably doing the same thing.
This led to my interest in a program called Recycle Rally, which I’d learned about from a neighboring district. I’d heard about how much the program helped educate students about recycling, so I wanted to do the same.
I took the idea to my administration, explaining how I thought it was an opportunity to get the whole school and community involved, and they loved it. Of course, it wasn’t just a yes right away. We had to sign up for the Recycle Rally program. We needed to look at logistics, like determining how to gather recyclable materials, figuring out funds for buying more bins, and selling the idea to the staff. But the setup wasn’t bad—I just worked on it before and after school. I knew it might be a lot of work to coordinate on my end, but it was important to me. There was an opportunity to make an impact both inside and outside of my classroom."
Although a slow start to initiate, the first year she focused on one grade in particular, fourth grade, as a trial run to see how the students would react. When that proved successful, she implemented it to the whole school the next year, even getting parents and community members involved.
"Teachers started discussing recycling on a bigger level by bringing it into their lessons and learning about the impact kids were making on the world around them. Our custodians were also amazing during this process, because it wouldn’t have been possible without them. They would help collect and weigh our bags. It really was a school-wide effort."
With the success in her elementary school, they were even able to spread this idea into the local high school.
"Like most projects that involve so many people, we had some snags along the way. Like when our small bins became overloaded, and we got complaints of “trash” all up and down the hallway. But this was an easy fix with larger bins. We also would sometimes get items that we couldn’t recycle, so we just continued to send home reminders to students about what we could take in the program.
All in all, I’ve been incredibly proud. This program ended up being an amazing way to get my special education students involved and seen as leaders at the school. I saw many of them become active participants among their peers across the school. And it was all through the power of recycling."
Recycle Rally Website: https://pepsicorecycling.com/RecycleRally?utm_source=Social&utm_campaign=PepsiCo18Recy_Art1_RRtoSchool
"Urban schools overwhelmingly underperform on state tests compared to rural and suburban schools. A 2003 report on schools in Michigan that failed to meet AYP found that 85% of the failing schools were in urban centers. A school’s independence rests on its testing success; resources in urban schools, from funding to professional development, are often focused on improving student test scores.
Other issues—like environmental education—can be overshadowed by testing. Damian Griffin of the Bronx River Alliance said the education program there used to run an election day training for 60 to 100 teachers in the Bronx, who would come “to learn about the river, water, soil”—and then carry that learning back to their students. This training stopped, Griffin said, as schools replaced it with professional development that was more directly related to test performance.
What kind of environmental education is worthwhile in the context of low achievement, low expectations, inexperienced staff, and high dropout rates? Can urban schools that are failing to meet AYP afford environmental education?
A growing pool of data shows that, in fact, environmental education can positively influence other problems in urban schools.
Environmental education (EE) schools focus on sciences and math to build environmental leadership and stewardship among students. Far from taking resources from test scores, EE has been shown to improve test scores.
A 1997-2002 Washington State study comparing EE schools to traditional schools with similar ethnic, socioeconomic, and location demographics found that the mean number of students who met testing standards for math and English was higher in EE schools for both subjects, across all five years of the study. Many teachers and administrators surveyed said that EE could improve attendance rates.
EE is especially important in cities because urban students are often cut off from nature—especially low-income urban students whose families are less likely to have time or resources to take them hiking or pay for a vacation. For decades, researchers have explored the benefits of green spaces.
A national study of over 500 parents and guardians of children with ADHD found that activities in green outdoor spaces reduced ADHD symptoms significantly more than activities indoors or in man-made outdoor spaces like parking lots. These results were consistent across age, gender, and socioeconomic demographics.
Environmental education programs set high expectations when they involve students in real projects and complicated community issues. “Research has shown that given the opportunity and appropriate support, students will live up to the high expectations set forth for them,” the RtI authors wrote.
Place-based environmental education links students to the nature that surrounds them. In the Calumet Region in Illinois, this means hands-on learning about conservation in the region’s fields, swamps and marshes. CEEP students develop leadership skills as they participate in internships and develop action projects in the region-wide program.
In urban schools, effective environmental education takes on extra values: improving student achievement and bringing green spaces to students disconnected with nature. To be effective in these schools, environmental education must account for community needs on a regional scale. And it must provide students with the life skills—problem solving, leadership, and field experience—that they need to succeed in school and in future careers.
Place-based, action based environmental education cannot be overlooked in the context of urban education. While test scores and budgets are tight, effective environmental programs provide indispensable nature exposure, life skills, and community leadership—and increase student achievement in the schools that need it most."
