Educator's Toolkit: Lightening the Load

Educator's Toolkit
The Green Guide, Issue 95
(March/April 2003O

Recycling

Teachers interested in exploring recycling can find a wealth of support from local and national organizations - and from fellow teachers, as this is a longstanding and popular environmental education topic.

Your state environmental agency, department of natural resources, or sanitation department will likely have a recycling curricula that is tailored to your local needs - ask your science coordinators or the relevant government agency. The popular Project Learning Tree program offers recycling curricula (www.plt.org). Bullfrog Films (www.bullfrogfilms.com) also offers several engaging video titles, including Here's My Question: Where Does My Garbage Go?, for sale or rental. Dale Seymour offers a Waste Reduction unit (for middle and high school) as part of its popular E2 series in Environmental Action (www.pearsonlearning.com/dalesey/full_e2.cfm). The Department of Energy offers a list of energy and recycling curricula at www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/eer/recycle.htm. The Center for Environmental Education at Antioch New England Institute also offers a database of curricula, along with its own favorite picks (including A Way With Waste and A Teacher's Resource Guide for Solid Waste and Recycling Education (www.cee-ane.org/curriculum/). Good recycling curricula - and there are many out there, for all grade levels - both explain the benefits of recycling and provide a guide for helping your school to improve its recycling efforts.

Ecological footprints - concrete measures, in hectares or acres, of how much stuff we use in our daily lives - can illustrate the benefits of recycling. See www.sustainabilityed.org/ef.htm for an introduction to ecological footprints and a guide to educational resources about ecological footprints. An ecological footprint calculator developed in Sweden, at www.demesta.com/ecofoot/eng/engrun.htm, asks students about paper, aluminum, metal, glass, and plastic waste. You can use this tool in several ways:
•you can put in different figures to see how much waste contributes to our ecological footprint, or •you can gather figures from research: average American waste quantities, average waste quantities per person generated by the people of your town - you can even monitor your school's waste production over a month to estimate its yearly output. Information and statistics about America's municipal solid waste can be found at EPA's www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/index.htm; you can ask the local government entities that handle waste and recycling for your community about local waste and recycling figures.

Did you know that at least 25 pounds of material was consumed to produce each pound of final product you purchase at a store? Explore a new concept in manufacturing: zero emissions, or "waste = food." Learn about the idea from William McDonough and Michael Braungart, in their 1998 Atlantic Monthly article, "The Next Industrial Revolution," at www.theatlantic.com/issues/98oct/industry.htm. You can find some examples of this new industrial process in action at the website of Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives, www.zeri.org/systems.htm.

Internet Health Hoaxes

Tired of credulous students citing incredible websites and Internet information as sources? "Women's Health: Searching for Clues" provides an excellent opportunity to help your students evaluate Internet sources and information. In this Green Guide article, an email hoax about a link between anti-perspirants and breast cancer is debunked-but this is only one of many health-related Internet hoaxes. Information received via email or the Internet sometimes is given more credibility than it deserves. Help your students become savvy consumers of electronic information by learning to ask the right questions: Who is disseminating the information? What is their evidence, and is it credible? Why is the speaker communicating the information? What other information or actions is the speaker or organization associated with? How could the information be verified or disproved? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have a web page that discusses and evaluates several Internet health-related hoaxes: www.cdc.gov/hoax_rumors.htm. Ask your students to visit this page, and choose a health-related hoax to explore. Do they agree with the CDC's conclusions? Do they find the evidence in the "hoax" email credible? Why might some receivers of the email believe it? The Urban Legends website, www.urbanlegends.com, also offers summaries and analyses of Internet-mediated hoaxes, which can be compared with your students' research.

More advanced high school students can delve further into the debate surrounding the Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project. A good three-part series on this study appeared in New York Newsday, a local Long Island paper, and are available at www.bcaction.org/Pages/LearnAboutUs/LongIslandBCStudy.html. The study's official website is at epi.grants.cancer.gov/LIBCSP/. Although written in 1998, and thus missing the study's new conclusions, the PBS series Frontline also offers an informative page about breast cancer in Long Island: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ shows/nature/disrupt/breast.html. Devra Davis' When Smoke Ran Like Water (reviewed in The Green Guide's bookstore) also can be useful, in that it provides a readable introduction to the challenges and promises of epidemiology.

Paper and Computers: What's the Full Impact?

Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things contains short, well-researched summaries of the life cycle of both a newspaper and a computer. Take your middle or high school students on a journey through the life of these products, from raw material extraction to manufacture, through use and ultimately to disposal or reuse.

Paper is even more fully explored in The Paper Trail: Connecting Economic and Natural Systems (Sustainability Education Center, www.sustainabilityed.org). This 4-week high school unit investigates the life cycle of paper and also introduces students to the major concepts of ecological economics, giving them a foundation upon which to envision an economy that accounts for the needs of the Earth and society as well as that of the marketplace. High school teachers can also delve into Lester Brown's excellent Eco-Economy (mentioned in "Waste Not," an interview with Lester Brown in Green Guide 95).

Did you know that not even African wildlife are safe from digital harm? In "The Dirt in the Machine," an August 2001 story in the New York Times Magazine, Blaine Harden details how the mining of coltan, a source of the tantalum needed in most electronic devices, is harming Congo wildlife and threatening gorillas. ($2.50 from New York Times online archive, www.newyorktimes.com)

Should your students be inspired to reduce, reuse, recycle, and safely dispose of computers, several Green Guide articles can inspire further actions. They provide suggestions on how to shop intelligently for computers, on how to pass computers on to other needy users, and on how to safely dispose of unrepairable or unusable electronics. You may even be able to organize a collection of closet-jamming digital devices that raises funds for your school. See "Artificial Afterlife," in Green Guide 95, and also "Dumping Computers Doesn't Compute!" and "Talkin' Trash about Your Old Cell Phone?" (in Green Guide 92)

Clean AND Green

After reading "Nontoxic Spring Cleaning," your students may wonder what hidden dangers are contained in the substances that clean your school. Dale Seymour Publications publishes Chemicals: Choosing Wisely, part of their Environmental Action series (www.pearsonlearning.com/dalesey/full_e2.cfm). This unit provides many lessons on investigating the chemicals used in a school building, and can guide your efforts to perform a school-wide inventory of cleaning products and practices. The Green Guide and the Children's Health Environment Coalition's Health E-House website (www.checnet.org/healthehouse/chemicals/chemicals.asp) are both excellent sources of information on problem cleaner ingredients. After research, your class can report on their findings to the larger school community, and lead efforts to choose safer cleaners. "Nontoxic Spring Cleaning" can help you select better products, as can the Healthy School Network's 8-page guide to Healthy Cleaning and Maintenance Practices (www.healthyschools.org/guides_materials.html).