Become a Landfill Expert

Research and learn about landfills including the nearest one in your area.

• Construct an Edible landfill model, label its parts, and explain it to your teacher before eating it.
• Or design and engineer a Landfill Model that will not leak contaminants into nearby soil and water.
• Know what features are used to minimize a landfill's impact on the environment, and discuss what else could be done to reduce the adverse impacts of a landfill.
• Research whether there are feasible alternatives to landfills for waste disposal? Or ways to reduce the volume of waste we produce?

Become a Recycling Expert

Recycling not only reduces waste, but it also reduces the demand for more things to be produced. Here are some things to research:

• Find out what can be recycled in your area, and where it can be recycled.
• Is there a MRF nearby? What does it do?
• Learn how to deal with some hard-to-recycle items at Earth 911 and Terracycle.
• Consider whether recycling could be more effective with strategies such as the Recycle Across America ToolKit.
• Research which materials can be recycled infinitely and which degrade in quality whenever they are processed.
• Try to determine why only 9% of some recyclable materials, such as plastics, are ever recycled.

Become a Composting Expert

Composting biodegradable materials such as food waste is one way to reduce the volume of materials sent to landfills.

• Research composting.
• Find out what is different about vermicomposting.
• Design your own investigation about biodegradability and carry it out. For example, burying different types of materials in the same soil to see if they degrade at the same rate; or burying the same type of material  under different conditions by changing one variable such as soil type, temperature, light, moisture, or presence of microorganisms or invertebrates in the soil.
• Engineer and build a classroom vermicompost bin of your own design, knowing that worms prefer dark, live in the top three-four inches of soil, and need moisture but can drown if there is no drainage. Install a bait cup of live red wrigglers (not night crawlers). Try it out, assess its effectiveness, and decide how you could refine and improve the design.

Become a Sustainable Materials Expert

One way to reduce the volume of trash in landfills is to prevent wasteful "stuff" from being made in the first place. Some strategies include increasing the durability of consumer goods; decreasing single-use disposables and excess packaging; and changing attitudes so that people are more receptive to used, second-hand, repaired or upcycled goods.

• Research the variety and proportion of waste materials sent to landfills in this report on Advancing Sustainable Materials Management and updates from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
• Investigate the following concepts:
  • "life cycle analysis (LCA)" (including this example of the LCA of a pair of jeans and this overview of the process)
  • "cradle to cradle" design, including this example of a recycled steel bench that can be 100% recycled again into a product of the same quality,
  • "the circular economy" which is also explained in Ray C Anderson's famous TED Talk on how he changed the business model of his company, Interface, to diminish its environmental impacts by "closing the loop" on material and energy flows.
• Consider the concept of "planned obsolescence" and identify examples of products you use that were intended by the manufacturer to have short life spans or to be single-use disposables, as well as whether there are justifiable reasons for such products.
• What do you do when something breaks or stops working? Check out the concept of empowering repair and learn how to fix something you use instead of throwing it away.