Riparian Repair and Filtration System Project

2015 Gimli, Manitoba, Canada

“Riparian areas act as natural filters for the water going through them,” wrote Gimli High School student Meghan. “My hope is that by creating or enhancing a riparian area in an already existing body of water that leads to the lake I can reduce the negative impact of some of the water entering the lake.”

Meghan’s idea is an important one to the Interlake communities surrounding Lake Winnipeg. Indeed, through partnerships with Nutrien, the East Interlake Conservation District, and Ducks Unlimited Canada, to name a few, over 1500 willows were planted in a riparian area. These willows will play an important role in soil erosion, and the filtration of water going to the lake. Moreover, thanks to Meghan this project demonstrates the power of partnerships!

Reducing Refills

2015 Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Sophie and Sarah saw an easy solution to a common problem at their school’s canteen: the use of Styrofoam cups. The duo proposed an incentive program for students that brought re-usable mugs for their coffee as a way to encourage students to bring their own mugs, thus reducing the number of Styrofoam cups used in the school. This is important because, “a Styrofoam coffee cup will remain in a landfill for close to 500 years. When heated it releases toxic chemicals into the food making it hazardous to your health and it fills up to 30% of landfill space around the world.”

Working with the school canteen, and with the help of Nutrien, Sarah and Sophie created an incentive program that will result in an increased awareness and less Styrofoam going to the landfill!

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.

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.

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.

Microbeads Educational Video

2015 Blackie, Alberta, Canada

The 2015 Caring For Our Watersheds 4^th place contest winners were Brayden Brausse and Nicholas Locken from Blackie School. These students were concerned about micro beads in the watershed, and the impact these small pieces of plastic have on plants, animals and water quality.

To bring awareness to this issue, the students produced a video about the harmful effects of micro beads and the use of alternative products that do not cause harm to the watershed.

Mirco beads come in 2 forms—polyethylene and polypropylene, both of which are used in household products such as exfoliating face washes and toothpaste. Micro beads are no bigger than a grain of sand can pass through storm water and waste water treatment systems (unfiltered) into the watershed. This plastic can then be ingested by fish and other sea-life and move up the food chain into larger creatures.

Alternatives to products containing micro beads are plentiful and widely available. They include cleansers containing walnut shells, apricot seeds or oatmeal. Through their educational video, these students were able to provide information about the harmful effects of micro beads on the watershed, and inform people on available alternatives.

Farming for the Future

2014, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

Farming for the Future

Within the Ohio River watershed, there are many subunits, including the Little Miami River watershed. The main focus of Nathaniel Polley and Chloe Halsted from Wyoming High School fell in Clinton County, as agricultural development contributes greatly to runoff in the Little Miami watershed. The ability to curtail this runoff would serve as a vital step to maintaining the health of the Ohio River.

After speaking with several local farmers, Nathaniel and Chloe discussed the techniques already being utilized with a proven record of success on farmsteads. Among these, and the easiest to implement, is the process of planting cover crops whose sole purpose is to conserve and improve the soil, thus providing a win-win situation for both the environment and the economic interests of the farmers. Cover crops need only a quarter of each acre on a given plot of farmland, yet they are instrumental in preventing erosion.

They needed to isolate which farms contribute the most runoff to the Little Miami watershed before strategizing where to plant cover crops. Overall, decreasing runoff and soil erosion via cover crops and waterways would ensure the stability of freshwater ecosystems and provide safer supplies of fish for human consumption. The initial money contributed to the activation of their phases I and II, which involved the funding for pinpointing sources of pollution alongside the purchase of cover crops. Moving forward, it is the hope that there could be governmental funding to allow farms to continue to improve and reduce the runoff going into the watershed.

The Dusty Old Trail

2014, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

The campus of Withrow High School is very large and open with a variety of areas that water can flow. At the bottom of each hill on campus, there are sewer drains, contributing directly to the problem of combined sewage overflow. Since the water is running straight into the drain and not being captured by plants or rain barrels, the sewage systems are flooded whenever there is intense rain. Dontaz Hadden and DeAaron Duskin noticed that near their school’s football field there was a dry dirt trail that results in an overflow of the drain and a large puddle when it rains. The water does not soak into the hillside along the fence since the hill is made of impervious clay.

To combat this runoff, Dontaz and DeAaron planted native grasses along the hill. The clay was dug up and replaced with healthy soil and compost, gravel was placed to serve as a walkway, and plants were planted. The Dusty Old Trail was replaced with a lively new one, bringing a breath of fresh air to Withrow’s campus.

Dusty Trail

Water Bottle Filling Station

Bottled water is becoming an increasingly popular choice among many students today. However, the these recyclable water bottles end up in landfills more often than not.

Ivonne Morales, a Greely Central High School student in Greeley, Colorado, noticed this trend and realized he must do something about it. Working with Liz Mock-Murphy, her teacher/mentor, she installed five water bottle filling stations in her school and encourages students to use reusable bottles.
Continue reading…

Thermal Pollution

2014 Wyoming, Ohio, USA

The Mill Creek is in the southwest corner of Ohio and empties into the Ohio River. It flows 28.4 miles through three different counties and about half a million people live within the watershed. It is mainly urban and industrial with some forested and agricultural lands located in the northern section. The Mill Creek also has many CSOs (combined sewer overflows) and SSOs (sanitary sewer overflows).

Thermal pollution is a problem in many of our urban streams, especially in the Mill Creek, that often flies under the radar. While thermal pollution doesn’t involve dumping massive amounts of chemicals into the rivers or many other signs that people generally associate with pollution, the heating and cooling of natural waterways (whether directly or indirectly caused by people) can have a bigger effect on wildlife ecosystems than people think.

Benny and Isabelle felt that they could do their part to reduce thermal pollution when it happens in a localized setting, such as when water temperature of creeks and streams rises due to lack of shading and foliage. Their solution was to plant trees along the banks of the North Branch of the Mill Creek. They felt it was an easy solution to tackle the problem of thermal pollution in local streams.

Benny and Isabelle put their project into action on May 10th, 2014. They had an excellent group of volunteers of both students and community members come out and help. Together they planted about 600 trees in about 3 hours. The areas where they planted were alongside a local stretch of the North Brach of the Mill Creek that was in need of restoration. It was a great time to be social and meet new people while helping out their watershed. Over all, they thought this was a very fun and education experience for them and they were honored to be offered such a wonderful opportunity.

Thermal Pollution