USA

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

What’s the Buzz

2017, Berthoud, Colorado, USA

Delaney and Emma identified a lack of interactive and educational games available to students online that teaches the current situation regarding bee populations in their watershed. To solve this problem, the students designed an online game that raises awareness and the positive steps that can be taken to help protect the honeybees in the area.

The main character in the game is Buzz the Bee. Buzz flies through several backgrounds and landscapes point out to game users the different positive and negative effects in the environment that can support or harm bees. The players then experience a series of educational questions that help them recognize the relationship of bees and human life. The what the buzz student project game colorado answers to the questions are recorded and a final report is give at the end of the game. Players can then use this score to identify how they can better help the bees in the watershed. The game can be found at: http://whatsthebzzz.com/

Trash or Treasure?: Recycling for a Healthy Environment

2017, Greeley, Colorado, USA

In order to reduce the amount of solid waste entering the Cache la Poudre watershed, people
need to understand the effects of their waste on the watershed. Indigo’s project began with educating middle school students at Chappelow Magnet School. She taught a 30-minute presentation to three 7^th grade science classes. Before and after the presentation, Indigo took a brief survey of the students to see how much they cared about recycling and how the presentation changed this response. There was a 130% increase in students that gave a 10 for their response after the presentation. trash or treasure greeley colorado student project implementation

In addition to this, she also created a mural from plastic trash. In order to do this, Indigo held a plastic cap collecting contest at Greeley Central High School. Over the course of the contest, she collected over 14,000 caps and created a mosaic. The mosaic took a little over 2,000 caps. The remaining caps were given to Chappelow Arts Magnet School, as they were doing a similar project.
The project was featured in the Greeley Central school newspaper. It was also posted on Facebook by the school. The original post has accumulated over 300 reactions.

The project easily reached the attention of over 1,000 people and kept over 14,000 caps from entering the landfill. More solid waste has been withheld through personal efforts of others as they have become aware of this problem.

Smarter Sprinkler Systems

2017, Milliken, Colorado, USA

While researching ideas for the Caring for Our Watersheds project, Tyler, Patrick and Cameron discovered a gigantic waste of water at their high school. The district was watering the recreational fields around the school. They studied and analyzed the watering period, amount, location, dates, etc., and concluded the watering style was inefficient and wasteful. To solve this issue, they proposed the implementation of WR2 rain gauge sensors. These sensors would stop the watering of the fields when rain or soil saturation is abundant and additional water would be wasteful. These sensors would not only save water, but also save money for the school, making it appealing to both environmental focused administratio Colorado student project smarter sprinkler n and budget focused as well. The students worked with the school district and installed three WR2 rain gauge sensors which have reduced water usage by 30-50%. They will be monitoring the water usage during 2017-2018 and reporting back to the school administration.

Don’t be Cruel, Recycle at School

2017, Milliken, Colorado, USA don't be cruel student implementation project colorado

Kayla Johnson, Mattea Klein, Aubrey Wallace
Roosevelt High School, Milliken, Colorado

Kayla, Mattea and Aubrey noticed a problem at their high school – there were not enough recycling bins at the school which resulted in the students and staff contributing over 48,000 pounds of trash per year into the landfill. Their solution was to add 7 more recycling bins don't be cruel recycle at school implementation project colorado throughout the high traffic areas of the school. The materials from the new recycling bins are being collected by Waste Management. The company already has a recycling contract with the school, so it did not increase the overall expenditure for the district.

Protect our Pollinators

2017, Greeley, Colorado, USA

Riley Wooten
Greeley Central High School, Greeley, Colorado

Riley decided to create a pollinator friendly environment in the City of Greeley. Riley contacted Karen Scopel, the Natural Lands Coordinator for the City of Greeley, and selected a nature area for her proposal. The herbicide to dispose of the invasive species location is called Pumpkin Ridge which is next to the Sheepdraw trail. The entire area has recently been burned and sprayed with “Cheatgrass”. The goal is to increase native plant species that will also be pollinator friendly. In addition, she installed two inset houses in the area. The native organisms that were planted are Showy protect the pollinators student action project colorado Milkweed, Palmer Penstemon, Butterfly Milkweed, White Clover, Purple Coneflower, Mexican Hat, Yellow Coxie Flower, White Yarrow, and Black-Eyed Susan. In April, Riley organized a group of volunteers to clean the area, sow the seeds and install the insect boxes.

Rain Away!

2017 Berthoud, Colorado, USA

Emma Garner
Berthoud High School, Berthoud, Colorado

Emma Garner identified an area at Berthoud High School where most of the parking lot runoff accumulates. As a result, the area has become a soggy-muddy area filled with automobile oil and trash. Emma decided to build a rain garden in this area to filter out project rain away colorado student action project contaminates that are deposited there from the parking lot. Although the rain garden is a small site test, it can be expanded in the future by the school.