Ohio

RECHARGING OUR WATERSHED

2018, CINCINNATI, OH, UNITED STATES

Since the production of electricity is harmful to the environment, it is crucial to try to reduce the amount of electricity humans use. Using the knowledge that electrically charged cell phones are an increasingly part of teenager’s lives, seniors Victoria Wilhelmy and Olivia Hartman and juniors Mia Semler and Tara Franke created an eco-friendly alternative to regular phone charging that could be implemented in their own school, The Summit Country Day.

Their solution to this energy-consuming phone dilemma was to create two public phone charging stations that run completely off solar energy. These two stations are located in sunny, popular areas of their four-story school building. Each station consists of three solar powered phone chargers that stick onto the windows. Accordingly, with each charger are cables designed to charge a variety of phones. Along with the actual chargers is a sign that explains to students not only what the stations are, but also what the environmental effects of using these chargers are. Consequently, students are able to benefit from the phone charger and become more environmentally conscious.

The actual process of making the stations was very simple. After ordering all the materials online and having them shipped to the school, the final step was just sticking the chargers to the windows and putting up the sign that explained to students what they were. This easy solution just shows how simple it can be to help the environment.

Victoria, Olivia, Mia, and Tara are all excited and proud that their eco-friendly alternative will benefit not only the future generations of high schoolers that come through the halls of the Summit, but also the quality of the environment in the future. As long as solar energy, a renewable source, is available, so are their chargers.

Recharging

CREATING A MORE BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW

2018, CINCINNATI, OH, UNITED STATES
Beautiful Tomorrow

While driving to and from school, Lily Melink would notice maintenance crews mowing the medians and berms of highways and local roads. She realized that mowing and maintaining acres of grass multiple times a year is responsible for releasing varying levels of CO2. Since the burning of fossil fuels is the main contributor to the high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, Lily wanted to find an effective solution to reduce the number of times the grass had to be cut, and therefore reduce CO2 emissions. She decided to plant wildflowers in these spaces to replace grass because wildflowers only require maintenance once a year.

This project was inspired by programs for planting wildflowers in North Carolina and Texas that Lily had read about. When her environmental science teacher introduced the Caring For Our Watersheds program to her class, Lily decided that it would be the perfect opportunity to implement a similar project in Cincinnati. She read more about wildflowers and learned that they have more benefits to the environment than just reducing the amount of maintenance and therefore CO2. Wildflowers also help prevent erosion and provide habitat area for wild life such as pollinators.
Beautiful Tomorrow

Lily hopes that her project can educate the public on simple actions they can take to benefit the environment and increase community pride in their surroundings. She has already had positive feedback from the public, and says that “It doesn’t take much to make a positive impact on the environment or a community!

T-SHIRT SCARVES FOR HOMELESS HEARTS

2018, CINCINNATI, OH, UNITED STATES

Every event today is seemingly paired with a commemorative t-shirt. This causes a problem for the watershed because for each new t-shirt made, humongous amounts of water are used. Also, these commemorative t-shirts are often just thrown away when they could be used further. To combat these two problems, Lauren and Jenice set up a collection at their school to collect these t-shirt that to others seemed to be at the end of their lives. Then, the two along with volunteers created scarves out of the t-shirts that were too worn to donate. This way the scarves could be used again.

The first step of the project was the collection of the t-shirts. Lauren and Jenice utilized the class competition system at their school in order to create excitement for their project. Each grade was given a designated bin to put their t-shirts. The grade that collected the most t-got points in the overall school competition. The collection went on for two weeks from March 19 to March 29. Every couple of days, the t-shirts were counted, and the number was relied to the students in order to keep up the competitive spirit. In the end, the collection managed to bring in a whopping 511 t-shirts to be turned into scarves or donated.

Next came the process of making the scarves. First, all of the t-shirts were washed and dried to make sure they were clean. Then the t-shirts were sorted, with the t-shirts too worn to be donated going towards making scarves. Lauren and Jenice then set up a day to get volunteers to help cut and braid all of the t-shirts into scarves. The design of the scarves were four strand braids, long enough to be wrapped around twice and thick enough to act as an effective scarf. With an army of volunteers, Lauren and Jenice were able to turn many worn and torn t-shirts into lovely scarves to donate. Lastly, all of the scarves and t-shirts were donated to Valley Interfaith Community Resource Center while the t-shirt parts that were not part of the scarves were donated to Matthew 25 Ministries.

Homeless Hearts

AERATION MODIFICATION

2017, CINCINNATI, OH, USA
Aeration Modification
Matthew Murphy of Oak Hills High School knew that he wanted his project to be both simplistic and effective, with the main focus to be his school’s bathrooms. Matthew’s high school building is older and hadn’t been renovated in a very long time, making the bathrooms a prime candidate for a water conservation project.

He found inspiration when he took a school field trip to the Ohio River with his AP Environmental Science class. There they discussed the issue of combined water sewer systems in the Ohio River Watershed; essentially when there is too much rain, the sewer system bypasses the water treatment plant and deposits a ton of pollution into the Ohio River. This outing helped to establish the primary goal of his project: reduce the total amount of water that Oak Hills puts into its combined sewer systems as a means to reduce the total waste put into the river during periods of heavy rain.

Matthew’s solution was to replace the faucet aerators in all the bathroom sinks around the school. An aerator is the part of the sink faucet where the water comes out. The old aerators in the school used 2.2 gallons of water per minute, equating to a total of 360,000 gallons of water over the course of 95 days. (2,650 people x 2 trips a day x 20 seconds x 2.2 GM x 95 days). The new aerators that he purchased for his school only used 0.5 gallons of water per minute, this in turn should only use 80,000 gallons of water over 95 days. (2,650 people x 2 trips a day x 20 seconds x 0.5 GM x 95 days)

This project not only has the ability to help the school conserve water, it also will allow the school to save roughly $2,000 every 95 days. In turn, he plans to propose using these dollar savings to hold a mini watershed project in his high school. Discussing water conservation and rewarding innovative thinking will help future classes of students create a more environmentally sustainable school. Matthew’s hope is that year after year, students continue the work to improve the school’s sustainability.

WEED-EX

2017, CINCINNATI, OHIO, USA

Claire Erny and Jacob Berry knew that residents in their hometown of Wyoming, Ohio yearned for a luscious and weed-free lawn. The dangers of trying to accomplish this goal can be serious and can contain a lot of chemicals and waste that may end up leaching into the waterways, affecting all aquatic life and drinking water. Jacob and Claire decided to come up with a recipe for an environmentally friendly and safe weed killer that is proven just as effective as other weed killers, but much more environmentally friendly, safer and a lot cheaper.

After looking at countless articles about natural weed killers, their teacher, Mr. Neimiller, informed them that he uses “vinegar and dawn dish soap” on his lawn at home, and it works wonders. To make a gallon of this weed killer, residents would need about one gallon of distilled white vinegar and two tablespoons of Dawn dish soap. Before deciding if they wanted to take on this project, Jacob and Claire needed try out this recipe for themselves. They soaked countless weeds with their homemade weed killer and approximately three hours later returned and the results were even better than expected.

The town of Wyoming has a smartphone app called ‘Next Door Wyoming’ people in the community can try to find babysitters, a cheap plumber, someone to walk their dog, pretty much anything. Jacob and Claire decided to make a post on Next Door Wyoming explaining their project and asking the citizens if they would like to try a bottle of the natural and homemade weed killer. Jacob and Claire expected to make about 10-15 bottles of weed killer, but received 40 requests in just 20 minutes. They quickly made extra bottles and dropped the weed killer off the next day and asked that residents email the results back to them.

Just one day after delivering the weed killer to all the residents, many emails came back with positive results and pictures. Not a single resident had a negative comment; some families even said they were going to stop using their old weed killer and start using the homemade version. Their favorite report came from a horticulturist from the Cincinnati gardens who said that her team was going to start using the homemade weed killer. They were able to book the Civic Center for late May (about a month after the final competition) and held an event to further educate the citizens on what a positive and major impact this has on our watershed, and only for $6.00.

Weed-Ex

HYDRATION STATION

2017, CINCINNATI, OH, USA

When faced with the challenge to improve her local watershed, Annie Smith thought of her school drinking water fountains. Her school is very old and while it has been remodeled several times, it seems several of the drinking fountains never got updated. So she developed a project she called the “Hydration Station.” It all started when she saw the enormous amounts of plastic water bottles being thrown away at her school. Her idea was to start the process of installing automatic water bottle refill stations around the school in order to reduce the number of plastic water bottles that Oak Hills High School throws away every single day.

Annie worked with the Caring For Our Watersheds staff, her mentors, teachers and Winnsupply company in Fairfield to acquire two water fountains to be installed in the school. Maintenance staff installed the first fountain (pictured below) in one of the main hallways within the school in order to maximize the usage of the fountain. After less than a week of being installed, the water fountain had already saved 395 water bottles, a number that will hopefully continue growing. That’s right, almost 400 bottles in just one week.

Annie graduated just after the CFW finals, but in the future she hopes to revisit the school and see how many water bottles have been saved. She hopes to take this newly collected data and propose that all the water fountains at Oak Hills High School be replaced with new water bottle filling stations. If this is successful, she plans on reaching out to the superintendent and proposing that all old water fountains in the district be replaced with new water bottle filling stations. She also hopes to work with the Oak Hills “Spirit Shop”, or book store, to get reusable water bottles with the Oak Hills logo on them, to be purchased and used by students and staff at the water fountains. The janitors had some issues with the ‘old’ plumbing, but they were able to build a frame to mount the new filling station. Persistence pays off.

Battery Recycling

2017 Cinncinnati, Ohio, USA

Lexi Meckes is a nanny for three kids after battery recycling ohio student implementation school and is always having to switch out old batteries in game systems. Through this experience she became aware of how many batteries were being tossed out. She started becoming more concerned about the problem as she researched the chemicals inside every single battery and began thinking about the impact these batteries have on our environment. As a senior at Sycamore High School she has been involved in Environmental Club, AP Environmental class, and engineering. With her background knowledge and interest she became motivated to help solve this problem.

When Lexi was introduced to the Caring For Our Watersheds project she knew right away that she wanted to work on a project concerning batteries. She saw a big problem in her community and figured out a simple, direct way she could improve this issue. For her Caring For Our Watersheds battery recycling ohio student project project, Lexi put in place a battery-recycling program in all the schools within the Sycamore School District. These pails are located in the front offices of all schools and have begun overflowing with all the donations from community residents. She hopes recycling batteries becomes just as routine as recycling paper and plastic. With this permanent project Lexi hopes to educate her community on the simple actions they can take to make a big difference.

After the project got started, the company changed their prices and it became too expensive to mail the filled buckets, so Lexi set up a meeting with a local recycling company to discuss where she can send or take the batteries to locally for recycling. Although Lexi has experienced a few bumps along the way, her project has definite staying power because of the broad community support and participation.

She hopes this project will grow into a citywide program and prevent thousands of batteries from ending up in the landfill.

Turning Trash into Treasure

2017, Cinncinnati, Ohio, USA

Tori Lyon and Veronica France developed a project called Turning Trash into Treasure, focused on improving their watershed (the Mill Creek) by reducing the amount of plastic bags that end up as litter. The project consisted of two parts, phase one and phase two. They began their project by educating their school community through daily announcements informing classmates on the importance of keeping their local watershed clean and the detrimental effects of plastic bags on turning trash into treasure ohio student action project the environment. After kick-staring the education portion of their project, they started working on implementing phase one.

Phase one of the project consisted of collecting plastic bags from their school community and distributing reusable cloth bags to the students. Tori and Veronica set up a station in a busy hallway of the school where students could turn in their plastic bags. For every 25 plastic bags a student turned in, they received a custom made, reusable cloth bag. Inside each cloth bag was an informational flyer containing more facts about the Mill Creek watershed and the detrimental effects of plastic bags as litter. In order to keep track of how many bags were brought in, each student who donated plastic bags filled out a slip with their name, grade and number of bags brought in. This provided Tori and Veronica with an easy way to account for the bags donated. After they held a week-long bag collection event and distribution at school, they transitioned into phase two of the project in which they created sleeping mats out of the collected plastic bags.

ohio student action project trash into treasure Phase two started with a bag prepping party at which everyone folded, cut, and looped the plastic bags into balls of “yarn”. This ball of plastic yarn was then crocheted into sleeping mats that were donated to the homeless. They conducted significant amounts of research on how to properly crochet plastic sleeping mats, as well as the benefits of sleeping mats for those who are homeless. The mat weaving process was very time consuming and involved intricate work, so the students sought out the help of their school community for completing this part of our project.

They had an overwhelming response to their project! Tori and Veronica were hoping to collect about 2,000 plastic bags, but received over 17,000 plastic bags. Since this was such a great number of bags, they are planning on donating the extra bags to Matthew 25 Ministries where groups of volunteers work to complete similar projects. They will continue to make mats until the end of the year.

Their project reached a large scope, and they were able to help improve the condition of our watershed.
Treasure

Jacob’s Big Project

2017, Cinncinnati, Ohio, USA
Jacob
Jacob’s big project is a coloring book for kids developed and designed by Molly Mariani, Abi Barret and Ashley Moher. The coloring book has several interactive pages that gets students of all ages involved in the conservation message. Along with the book, Ashley, Molly and Abi designed several worksheets for different age children. The one for younger students has pictures and the kids describe whether it’s helpful or harmful. The worksheets for older kids include a vocabulary sheet.

The team knew from the start that they wanted to do a project that involved younger students. They didn’t just want to design a book, so they thought if they made it more interactive, they could get younger students to understand their role in protecting the environment. Designing a coloring book that the younger students could color on was one way the girls could get the students more involved. They also made a change to their original plan by adding the interactive worksheets so that they could measure the students understanding of the problems and test their knowledge. The addition really boosted their project because it allowed them to measure their success through the kid’s ability to complete the activity worksheets.
Jacob
To implement their project, Ashley, Molly and Abi visited local schools, which included a preschool and an elementary school. For the preschoolers, they read the book aloud to them then the preschoolers completed the “helpful or harmful” activity. For the elementary school visit, the kids read along with the story and colored the book. After the book was finished, they completed the vocab sheet to apply their knowledge.

COMPREHENSIVE E-WASTE MANAGEMENT

2016, CINCINNATI, OH, UNITED STATES
E-Waste Management image
In response to the growing issue of e-waste, Sam Haward from Wyoming High School decided to create a solution that extends the lifetime of old electronics while also ensuring that the entire device will be recycled once it’s lifespan has ended. The plan would first be implemented on a small scale through the Wyoming’s science department, first creating a small array of devices running the BOINC program, an app that connects these devices to supercomputers across the globe. By doing this, various supercomputers running data like Oxford University’s Global Climate Change Model can save energy and time by using client devices rather than generating number in one place.

Sam would donate the devices that cannot support BOINC to the HopeLine program, which supports victims of domestic violence. The arrays of BOINC devices could potentially be made completely self-sufficient over time by utilizing solar power, and interest generated by the small scale arrays can influence students across the county to donate their used electronics rather than leaving them to gather dust or throwing them away. In this way, these devices will find a new life, aiding scientific research, conserving and protecting the environment, while also freeing up space around the house too!