My students need aluminum water bottles to replace the plastic bottles they bring to school and then throw away each day, in turn incorporating a lesson plan which educates students on the life of a plastic bottle.
I currently teach in a second grade classroom at a public school in Honolulu, HI. This "aluminum water bottle" project aims at educating every student at Waikiki Elementary about the true cost (from raw materials to end recycling) and implications of plastic bottles. Our overall goal is to educate students on plastic's effects on our environment and give them tools to become "Waikiki plastic free" by using environment friendly items such as stainless-steel water bottles. We would like to begin this project with the new incoming class of K-6 students.
This project is needed because plastic bottles are being wasted in mass amounts. Every student at Waikiki is asked to bring a water bottle to class everyday due to the hot climate. We polled some of the teachers at Waikiki and they estimated about half of the students in their class bring a plastic disposable water bottle every day. With approximately 550 people (assuming these plastic-using students are bringing a new bottle each day), about 275 plastic bottles could be possibly thrown away each day. If we could supply students with stainless-steel water bottles at the beginning of the year, they could leave these at school and simply refill them daily, eliminating the waste of plastic bottles. Students could also use these water bottles throughout their elementary school years.
Student teachers (already in existence at Waikiki) have volunteered to be trained to educate classes about the true cost of plastic- the process from raw materials to recycling the waste. A specific lesson plan will be designed for them to use with each classroom at Waikiki focusing on the topic of humans impact on the environment (Benchmark SC.ENV.5.2 Assess the effect of human actions on an environmental system). After this lesson plan, the stainless-steel water bottles will be distributed to the students and teacher. We are hoping that students will take this information home and share it with their families.
Our ultimate goal for this project is to get families to reduce waste through education. We aim to help our students understand the reduce-reuse-recycle process and how much energy it takes to create plastic bottles and then recycle them again. We will teach them to make better choices that they will share with their parents and siblings at home. If we could ultimately eliminate the usage of disposable plastic water bottles that our students are bringing to school and replace them with stainless-steel bottles, this alone would be a tremendous success.
Your help will ensure that my students and their families understand the importance of human actions to the environment and give them an important tool (aluminum bottles) as a starting point to make a difference!
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