Trash Talk and Wrapping It Up

Friday we watched a video clip from the TED talks by Charles Moore about the plastic trash that is ending up in our oceans. You can see it here: The Great Pacific Trash Island. We keep generating more and more plastic and our recycling efforts are not keeping up with it. We looked at the anatomy of an landfill at the How Stuff Works website. Modern landfills are designed to seal away our wastes so that it won't contaminate our water supplies and to safely vent off methane gas, that is a significant greenhouse gas. We looked at maps of the Orange County Landfill and discussed the history and the current issues surrounding the future of this site. We compared this to the Puente Hills Landfill that takes most of the garbage for Los Angeles, at 1300 acres, it is one of the largest in the US.
Monday and Tuesday we are putting the finishing touches on our projects, "It Costs What?" These are due on Wednesday, December 14th.

Project Work on "It Costs What?"

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we worked on our projects. We have been researching the sources of the materials used in manufacturing our products and the resources consumed and pollution created at each step. Products that are being researched include breakfast cereals, chocolates, lipstick, shoes, coffee and tea drinks, violin bows, and basketballs. These projects should be finished up by this weekend and then will be presented on Wednesday, December 14th.

The stories of our stuff

Today we read from "Confessions of an Eco-Sinner," by Fred Pearce. In this book he goes to the source of some of his food, clothing, materials and the energy that he uses most days. We read about cotton production in Australia, the US and Uzbekistan, the three largest producers in the world. In particular we learned about how much water is used to make a tee shirt (33 bathtubs worth!) and the pesticides used to grow cotton (one quarter of all pesticides used on crops in the US). We also read about the plight of the banana and how it is facing eventual extinction from disease unless we find a new source of genetic diversity to build up its resistance to these threats. This lead to more stories about the limited varieties of the foods that we eat and the need to preserve genetic diversity in order to have healthy food supplies. The readings sparked some good discussions about genetically modified foods, the use of animals in research and synthetic versus natural materials for clothing. We will continue to research our stories of the stuff we use (It Costs What?) and these poster projects will be due on Wednesday, December 14th.

Friday we watched most of a documentary called, "T-Shirt Travels" about the used clothing market in Africa. It followed the story of a young man in Zambia who buys a bale of used clothing from the US and sells it in his hometown in order to make a living. It turns out that the number one export from the US to Africa is used clothing and this has had a big impact on the economies of African nations. It follows up on the story of our t-shirts and what happens to them after we drop them off at used clothing places like the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Here is a link to a summary on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/tshirttravels/film.html

Here is a link to where you can click on each stage of the travels of a t-shirt as it makes its way from US charity bin to African marketplace:
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/tshirttravels/track.html

"It Costs What?" Projects

We have been working on our "It Costs What?" projects today and on Tuesday. Yesterday the 4th years went on a field trip to the NC Museum of Life and Science to see the RACE Exhibit. Check out their website about the exhibit at NCMLS.org. The exhibit looks at race from cultural and scientific viewpoints.
The "It Costs What?" project is looking at an everyday object like a tee shirt and tracing its path from natural resources to finished product that we buy in a store. Along the way different resources are used and pollution is created, these are the hidden costs of the product. Students are working individually and in pairs to research their products and then will create a poster of their findings. Here is the project outline and rubric.  Last Monday we did a values line up called "Where do you stand?" in which I read a statement and then we lined up according to how strongly we agreed or disagreed with the statement. This sparked some good discussions. Here are the questions, we had time for 4-5 of them. We finished that day listening to a radio program from the show "Marketplace" from American Public Media about a "Well traveled Breakfast." The author traces the sources of the foods that his family eats on a typical morning. You can listen to the story and read about it here: Marketplace, A Well Traveled Breakfast.