What Happens to Our Trash?
- emily29939
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Every year, I like to start the school year with a lesson about trash, recycling, and compost. And before you skip on because those may not feel like the most glamorous topics, I want you to think about how often we interact with them.
It probably won’t take long to realize that these things are part of our everyday lives and usually, more than once a day!
This year, I started our lesson by giving the students an overzealous story of everything I had used or touched from the moment I woke up until we sat down for class. I talked about turning on the water, brushing my teeth, using toothpaste, making my bed, making coffee, spilling my coffee (of course!), cleaning it up with a towel, packing my lunch, picking out my clothes, driving to school, and on and on.
As you can imagine, my list went on for quite some time and I obviously didn’t even include everything!
Then I asked the students to imagine all of the things I had touched that morning. How big would that pile be? They stretched their arms as wide as they could to show me.
Then I asked, “What if we put everything we used in a pile for an entire week?”
This time, students started standing up to show me just how much bigger the pile would be.
And then came the big question: What if everyone in our classroom put everything they used in a pile for a week?
We all agreed that it would probably fill our entire classroom.
Although this sounds like a wild idea, we realized that people actually do put the things they use into a giant pile. We just call it a landfill.
We talked about how the things we throw away at school and at home don’t simply disappear. Once they leave our space, they have to travel somewhere else to be managed. And many of the things that end up in landfills can remain there for years and years.
It can feel a little overwhelming to think that something we use today could still be around 100 years from now or even longer. But there is another side to that thought that I find much more empowering: we get to make choices about
what we use and what we consume.
As a class, we agreed that there are some things we simply have to buy, and that’s okay! What we can do is think carefully about the choices we make and look for ways to reduce the amount of waste we create.
The students came up with lots of ideas for reducing waste at school and at home. Some suggested buying snacks and granola bars in bulk to avoid individually wrapped snacks. Others talked about choosing products that come in recyclable containers. We also discussed being mindful of the materials we already have and making sure we aren’t wasting things like paper in our classroom.
Then we flipped the conversation around and thought about the things we are already doing really well to keep waste out of the landfill.
We bring reusable water bottles to school!
We use reusable containers for our snacks and lunches!
We use hand towels instead of paper towels!
We compost!
And those are just a few examples.
Since we are a class full of scientists, we decided we needed to run an experiment!
Over the last week, each class has been collecting the trash from their lunches. This week, we’ll calculate how much waste we created and then see if we can make less waste the following week.
Who knows? Maybe we can even work our way toward a zero-waste week in the future. How amazing would that be?!
A Challenge for Home
So, here’s my challenge to you as we begin a new month:
Is there one thing, big or small, that you can do as a family to help reduce the amount of waste going into the landfill?
Maybe it’s buying snacks in bulk and packing them in reusable containers. Maybe it’s starting to compost your dinner scraps. Or, if you’re like me, maybe it’s remembering to keep your reusable bags in the car!
Whatever you choose, let’s all take one small step toward modeling what it means to care for our environment. 🌎
Enjoy these photos from a student perspective!
We are trying something new this year! Each class, one student gets a turn using my reusable film camera! It's been super sweet to see class from their eyes!
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