Beautiful Bee Box

2015 Berthoud, Colorado, USA

This duo has installed a pair of Italian honey bee hives near the foothills of Loveland. The reason they chose to implement this idea is to do with both the declining population of the honey bee as well as the recent flooding that has occurred in the Thompson River watershed. Due to the fact that honey bees are responsible for over 80% of vegetation pollination they essentially allow plants to produce and spread faster, thus helping ensure that growth occurs where it was washed near the river. This will prevent the amount of soil erosion around rivers and help keep the water cleaner.
The benefit to raising the bee population in North America, specifically the Midwest, is to ensure a greener landscape with more vegetation, assisting in cleaning both the air as well as the water in the Little Thompson watershed. A large amount of vegetation around a body of water prevents the amount of soil erosion entering the body of water, and keeps the water cleaner.

Beautiful Gardens of Hope

2015 Greeley, Colorado, USA

This project is a simple rain garden. Rain gardens are mostly used for decoration, but are very beneficial to the environment. These gardens are between 6-10 inches deep and can be built to any size. The purpose of this garden is to prevent flooding of a certain area, as the gardens hold a lot of water that would otherwise flood the area, and in turn also keeps excess nutrients in soils from entering waterways. One great benefit is these rain gardens aren’t machines or mechanical systems so you enjoy the gorgeous view of the garden without knowing its true purpose.
Rain gardens are built for many reasons and have many benefits. They are made to be pretty and enjoyable, but also reduce local flooding, conserve water, increase water quality in waterways and increase water quantity in waterways.

Misdeed of the Microbead

2015 Greeley, Colorado, USA

Your everyday products such as toothpastes, facial cleansers, and body washes have little pieces of plastic called polyethylene beads which are more commonly known as microbeads. So, what’s the big deal? Well these little microbeads are so small in diameter that they aren’t picked up in filters, and end up in rivers, lakes, and oceans. Ultimately, they line the bottoms of water bodies, killing and harming fish and other species along the way. The best way to end this is through education and knowledge; if people actually knew of the harmful effects, they would seek a more natural alternative.
Education can be a small scale implementation but can quickly become a larger scale. Through social media we can support banning of microbeads, plus having anyone switch to an alternative could help on an individual by individual basis; every person that switches will make a difference. Just think, only one of Neutrogena’s “Deep Clean” contains thirty-six hundred thousand microbeads – one less tube in our water system would make a difference.

Watershed Education

2015 Greeley, Colorado, USA

Children are the future; therefore it’s important for them to have proper knowledge about our world to make it a better place.

To increase awareness, students launched a 4 week program into Mrs.DeLacruz’s fourth grade classroom, focusing on water conservation, energy, and the environment. This program included fun activities like planting trees, water cycle memory games, and the 4th grade students even raced solar powered toy cars made of recycled materials!

The elementary students are now knowledgeable about ways to help their local watershed by conserving water and energy. By focusing efforts into one classroom, each student now has a good understanding of a watershed. This will hopefully lead to a positive ripple effect, and the students sharing their learnings with their families and friends.

Shotgun Shell Recycling

2015 Greeley, Colorado, USA

This proposal was to educate the community about the dangers of leaving shotgun shells and other gun casings on the ground after hunting, and also the benefits of recycling the brass from the shells. To implement this project, the students provided informational pamphlets at various hunting stores within our watershed, such as Garretson’s and Sportsman’s Warehouse. Within the pamphlets there is information about the environmental dangers of leaving the shells and casings, the perks of proper disposal, and how to remove the brass from the plastic of shotgun shells. Not only do the pamphlets aim to give information about the perks of proper disposal, but also let people know that places within our Watershed will accept the brass and will even pay for it.
The environmental benefits of educating the community about the proper disposal of shotgun shells and other gun casings are having cleaner hunting grounds; the wildlife within the grounds will not be negatively impacted by the metal residue, and groundwater will be cleaner from the reduction of metal pollutants from shotgun shells and casings.

Environmentally Friendly Household Cleaners

2015 Greeley, Colorado, USA

This project was to create and distribute an environmentally friendly household cleaner. The goal was to get families to replace cleaners that contain harmful chemicals with ones that will not hurt the environment. The students made a recipe out of vinegar, Borax and water. The recipe was included on the bottle and in the brochure, so people could continue to make it on their own. Once the substance was created, the students passed their product out to families at the school’s spring parent-teacher conferences. They contacted the recipients of their product and asked them about their experience with the product to gain feedback as well.
The cleaner could potentially cut down on the amount chemicals used by each family that receives and switches to the students’ product. This in turn cuts down on the overall amount of chemicals polluting the water in our watershed and decreases Eutrophication, which saves local plant and animal life. The students were able to produce the project on a very small scale using only families at the school, but even then one hundred bottles were distributed. The focus of the project is to help people understand that they do not need to use products with chemicals and that they can make safer, cheaper options on their own; they will hopefully also tell their friends and family about this causing a ripple effect; the more people there are who know about it, the more people there are who will choose to make it on their own.

Using Bats to Stop Bugging the Poudre

2015 Greeley, Colorado, USA

In order to reduce the use of pesticides in their city this team sought to put up bat houses around the Poudre Learning Center area. They discovered the Greeley parks and recreation department spends $50,000 annually on pesticides alone. Strategically, the main focus of the project is to reduce the amount of pesticide sprayed around Greeley. By hosting bats such as the Brazilian free-tailed bat, little brown bat, and the Canyon bat who all share a common appetite for mosquitoes, the population of mosquitoes will go down naturally. Mosquitoes can carry and spread diseases which factors greatly into why the city puts so much into controlling the population of the mosquitoes. However, the chemicals in pesticides have negative consequences such as affecting human health if ingested and the health of the entire watershed. To best reduce the use of pesticides the students wanted to show that it is best to work with nature to control the mosquito population and prevent chemical compounds from getting into the water. By raising awareness and showing the city bats can help control the mosquito population, the students hope that the use of pesticides will go down. It is crucial to protect our local watersheds for not only ourselves, but the generations to follow.
Eventually the mosquito population in the summer will rise, but the bat homes around the Poudre River will host the bats that feed on mosquitoes. Instead of using $50,000 worth of pesticides Greeley can decrease the amount of sprayed pesticides. The surrounding environment will benefit greatly especially the watershed because significantly fewer chemicals run into the water. Fewer chemicals equal healthier aquatic biomes and species – including humans – which survive on the Poudre watershed.

Quitting the Bottle

2015 Berthoud, Colorado, USA

On average Berthoud High School uses 15,000 water bottles a year. This is a huge waste of plastic. These students’ felt that as a high school, they could take the lead and be a role-model for the community by getting rid of plastic water bottles. Their proposition to reduce the amount of litter in their local watershed was to install a water bottle refill station in Berthoud High School. With this new refill station, students and staff are able bring in their own water bottles and refill them with clean, filtered water throughout the day in order to reduce the amount of plastic water bottles that they buy as an alternative. These bottles are often thrown away instead of recycled, meaning they end up in landfills, and thus pollute the watershed.

Before the water bottle refill station was installed, the school was selling up to 300 plastic bottles of water per day. Many of these bottles ended up in the trash bins rather than being recycled. With the new refill station, the students’ hope that water bottle sales will be a fraction of what they were in the past because more people will be choosing the reusable option. If all of the schools in the district installed these refill station, it would keep a monumental amount of plastic out of landfills and out of watersheds.

Gusto-Matic 5280-X

2015 Greeley, Colorado, USA

This project consists of a foot-powered hand dryer that uses no resources and saves tons of resources. To combat the major problem of paper waste and the electricity used as an alternative, this students’ proposal was to create a foot powered-hand dryer. This foot powered hand dryer will create no emissions from electricity generation and will have no paper waste from thrown away paper towels. The only energy consumed: calories. Only waste created: heat. If the hand dryer is installed in one bathroom, it can save 13.5 trees worth of paper towels, and 810 lbs. of coal in electricity generation over the course of one school year. The GUSTO-MATIC 5280-X has many environmental benefits. The immediate benefits include no paper waste, and no electricity consumption. This has many secondary effects, like no deforestation for the paper towels, no need to make more room in the land fill or take out the trash every day, no water pollution, no energy consumption from power plants, meaning no air pollution from the power plants.

I Thought I Saw A Tweety Bird

2015 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

Jocelyn Lalach from St. Edward School is passionate about birds and is sharing that passion with others! Birds are an integral part of our watershed. Indeed, without them, many functions that they provide would no longer exist. Jocelyn explored the benefits of healthy bird populations and their benefits to the South Saskatchewan River Watershed such as reducing insect populations and seed transportation in the river valley.

Birds provide many benefits to our local watershed! Through transporting seeds in the river valley, Student winning photo saskatchewan student action project birds help new native shrubs grow and root in the riparian area providing wildlife habitat and other ecological services. The riparian area is the zone along river or creek banks close to the water. This zone needs strong and healthy shrubs to help keep pollutants out of our water ways. Plants in the riparian area slow down water and help it infiltrate and filter through soil and root systems before entering our watershed. This process reduces the amount of runoff entering our water ways and helps to prevent pesticides, fertilizers, and other pollutants from entering our watershed. As an added benefit, these shrubs and their root systems provide structure for the soil along river and creek banks which prevent erosion. Lastly, birds eat insects. The healthier our bird populations in our watershed the more insects they eat and the less pesticides we use to control them ourselves!

Jocelyn developed a curriculum based program called “I Thought I Saw a Tweety Bird” that educates students in grades 2 and 3 about the different types of bird species found in the South Saskatchewan River Basin. She developed a bird unit that is available online here: http://ycojchill.wix.com/birds-unit with all the necessary tools for teachers and students to learn about the importance of birds to their watershed. Jocelyn has left her website up online for teachers to access the curriculum material.