Recycle the Present, Save the Future

2017, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Liam Recycle Student Action

Liam DeLeon from Maples Met School was awarded an environmental prize for creating a simple awareness video for youth on the achievable steps they can take to help keep their watershed healthy.

“I want to target kids that are 13 and under so that they will be able to start recycling at a very young age. I believe that this idea will make a very positive change to our environment, because it will really bring people together in our community.”

Liam’s video was very well received at the Caring for our Watersheds finals, and he is excited to present it at various educational events happening in his community. Recycle presentation student action

“To expand the knowledge of my community, I have made plans to present to the local schools and to start with the students and the teachers. I want to visit Elementary Schools around my area where I can showcase my video to inform the citizens of Winnipeg about the problem in our watershed and how we can all come together and solve it.”

You can view Liam’s presentation here: https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/dNIvgzPgSXd/?mode=presentation#/

Recycling Basketball

2017, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Recycling basketball student action

Rayna Premack, a grade seven student at Holy Cross School, wanted to make recycling more fun for her fellow students, so she came up with the idea to place basketball hoops over the recycling bins to encourage students to use them! Making recycling more fun can be a great way to get everyone involved.

“As we increase our recycling, we are downsizing the pollution across the world… Recycling in a fun way supports children and adults in making them realize that it is good for the environment.”

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

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.

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.

One Paint Can at a Time

2017, Milliken, Colorado, USA

Erin Engels and Keana Morris
Roosevelt High School, Milliken, Colorado

Throughout Weld County, leftover cans of paint are often tossed into the trash and sent to the landfill. Erin and Keana developed a plan to collect this unused paint. They worked with GreenSheen Paint Company (greensheenpaint.com) and organized a paint recycling day in their home town of Milliken. The students advertised at every school in their district and throughout the community. Although the weather did not cooperate, they collected over 1300 pounds of paint, stain and finishes. The water-based paint is remixed to create 16 new colors and the non-paint items were sent to the hazardous waste disposal site

10 Years of Pollution

2017, Milliken, Colorado, USA

Kristopher Anaya, Thomas Blake, Dalton Yost Colorado student action project
Roosevelt High School, Milliken, Colorado

This proposal involved reducing the use of plastic bags by promoting the use of reusable bags and making the community more aware of recycling them as well. The decomposition process of plastic bags takes more than 10 years which adds an unnecessary volume to the landfills. The team ordered 2000 reusable bags to hand out to students and staff at Roosevelt High School and the community. In addition,
the team redesigned the plastic bag recycling box at our local grocery store to make the box stand out to plastic bags consumers. This project has increased the use of reusable Colorado student action project grocery bags in the community while decreasing plastic in the local landfill.

Biodegradable Lunch Waste Project

2017, Greeley, Colorado, USA

Mazlyn Freier LUNCH WASTE PROJECT student action Colorado
Greeley Central High School, Greeley, Colorado

Mazlyn Freier from Greeley Central High school identified her school’s problem of adding over 10,000 Styrofoam plates from the school lunch program to the local landfill every year. Mazlyn contacted the school district Nutrition Services to determine the convert her school to compostable sugarcane plates in the cafeteria. Mazlyn contacted local companies for samples of their compostable plates. Finally, she selected Eco Products, a local food service supplier from Boulder, Colorado, for the sugarcane plates for the school. 19 cases of plates were ordered and delivered to the school for use in the cafeteria. In addition, Mazlyn contacted a local composting service that agreed to pick up the colorado student action lunch waste project plate waste twice a week. The school has been using these plates since April of 2017, and plan on continuing this practice. Mazlyn has contacted the other schools in the district with the goal of implementing this program throughout Greeley.

Sweet Dreams for the Environment

2016, San Antonio de Areco, Buenos Aires, Argentina

– EES N°4 Malvinas Argentinas –Students: Carlos Roman Barrios, Brisa Regina Gambatesa, Alexis Fabián Sambugnah, Sabrina Trinidad Sosa

This project will focus on an environmental problem associated with waste produced by the horse racing industry, what is known as “the horse bed”.

vermicomposting student action Students proposed the implementation of a worm compost (vermicompost) production module. The aim of this is that it will allow students to learn how to manipulate all aspects related to the production and selling of a natural fertilizer like worm compost (vermicompost), and it will enable them to imagine, in the near future, a local source of green work.