Students teach about plastic pollution

"Single-use disposable plastic " is not a good subject to get started on with Rima Givot, Sisters High School (SHS) science teacher. She knows from current research how plastic cups, plastic straws, plastic bags, waste-bin liners and such are clogging Earth's oceans.

Givot decided to provide her students a first-hand look at the single-use plastic overdose in the community. She sent them dumpster-diving for three days in a row in the school's trash, and requested they report what they found.

It didn't take long before the students came back with more than even Givot thought they'd find: Thousands of single-use plastic bags; plastic straws, plastic cups, plastic spoons. Over 17 percent could have been recycled.

To do something positive to offset the negative, Givot had the students do some deep thinking and come up with actions to help solve the plastic dilemma. Some of their ideas are:

•â¯Pick up plastic (and other) garbage around the school, home and community.

•â¯Educate people about the harm single-use disposable plastic is doing to the Earth, and teach about ways to reuse single-use items or not use them at all.

•â¯Set up a compost project at SHS.

•â¯Make a presentation to the school board.

•â¯Raise funds to purchase and sell reusable lunch bags and water bottles to students and staff.

•â¯Five different groups developed lessons for elementary and junior high students on ways to reduce the needs for single-use disposable plastic and to ensure what is used will be recycled.

The work provides data Givot can use in her online master's "action project" she is working on through the Global Field Program at Miami University. The data she is gathering, added to her own teaching skills, are then transferred to her students - several of whom are thinking about teaching as a career.

Her students are teaching younger students in Sisters schools.

Last Wednesday afternoon five of Givot's students - along with their gigantic Plastic Person (piloted by Ashley Bloking) brought the story of plastic pollution to the third- and fourth-graders.

They began their lessons with a short film that described how plastics have become a world-wide pollution problem on land, sea and air, with an estimated 100 million tons of plastic in the sea. The film also demonstrated how plastic has become, what one narrator calls, "phony food," contaminating animals in the sea, and passing the chemicals along to us as we dine on fish from the sea.

Using a piece from a plastic straw, a portion of a zip-lock plastic bag, plastic water bottle cap, and a plastic spoon, the SHS students taught the younger students how to analyze plastics to determine which ones would float in fresh water and salt water. From that data the younger children began to understand more clearly how plastic is saturating the environment.

In the upcoming weeks, several more SHS science students will be providing additional students lessons at Sisters Middle School in plastic use and recycling.

Fourth-grade teacher Clay Warburton summed up the day, saying, "When students teach students there is more of a connection; not like parents telling kids, or my working with kids. I think they all get to see the world we want to live on."