Recycling at Circleville Elementary

I was able to convert the fifth grade classrooms at Circleville Elementary School into paper recycling factories. Each recycling engineer made a piece of paper board 10 inches in diameter from recycled newspaper and old homework sheets. In the process they learned how a paper recycling factory would work.

Leading up to the recycling activity was a discussion on trash. Why we need to do something about it and how we can start to lessen the amount of trash we produce. According to the Southeastern Public Service Authority, a solid waste management agency, the average person throws out about 6 pounds of trash per day. That adds up to more than a ton of trash that each of us ends up throwing out every year. What are we going to do with all this trash. Certainly not bury it all in someone's back yard!

Most people are familiar with the 3 “R’s” – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle (I’ve been hearing some talk about adding another “R” – Repair). They are listed that way on purpose. Reduce is the first thing that we should do to deal with our trash problem. Reuse and Recycle are the second and third thing we should be doing. I think most people know a lot about the second and third solutions but they don't know as much about the first, Reduce, and that's the one we should be doing the most. It's the one less understood and more difficult to accomplish.

What does Reduce mean as far as our trash is concerned (I once heard one of my environmental education camp counselors say reducing our trash meant to put it into a compactor and make it smaller. – unfortunately that is not what it means and really does nothing to solve the trash problem)? It really means that we do things so that there is less trash made to begin with. That’s what makes it more difficult to accomplish. Having less trash made means that we all have to make things and buys things differently. Here’s a great example for students to consider.

Many of us like to eat junk food like potato chips, pretzels or cheese doodles. Here we see two different size packages that we can purchase. Buying one of these snacks creates more trash than buying the other. Which one results in more trash?

At first glance we’d think it's the bag on the right. Yes, it is smaller and when thrown away would be less trash than the package on the left (ah, you say “George, we can recycle it!” – yes it is plastic and theoretically recyclable, but in reality there isn’t a market or manufacturer that can do a business of recycling snack packages so even if you save the empty packages there’s no place to take them to be recycled) .

Let’s look deeper, though. If you got the package on the right for snack time and your mom or dad got the package on the left you’d cry out “Not fair!” Of course it wouldn’t be fair. Your dad or mom would end up with more snack. You would get 2 ounces of snack while your parents got 7 ounces (reading labels is very helpful).

In order to make it fair you’d have to buy more of the small packages. How many more? You do the math and you'll see that it is two and a half packages. Oh, oh. You can’t buy two and half packages, so you end up buying three more packages for a total of four packages to get the same amount (actually a little more – which I’m sure wouldn't mind) as your parent.

What does this mean then as far the trash that you will throw into the garbage when you’re done eating the snacks. Let’s do the math; a large bag is 14 inches tall and 8 inches across. That means there would be 112 square inches of plastic going into the garbage. No, wait! There’d be twice that amount. Why? Because there are two pieces of plastic to make the bag, the piece in the front of the bag and the piece in the back. You’d be throwing into the garbage can 224 square inches of plastic.

Let’s look at the small bag. It measures 10 ½ inches tall and 5 ½ inches across which gives us an area of 57 ¾ square inches of plastic. Don’t forget we have to double that for the two pieces of plastic that make up the bag. So one of our little bags is 115 ½ square inches. But we have four of these small bags because we wanted to have the same amount of snacks as mom or dad. So we end up throwing into the trash can 462 square inches of plastic. Four hundred sixtytwo square inches is a lot more than 224 square inches!

Another way to think about this is to figure out (and it means more math) how much plastic there is for each ounce of snack. The large bag, 224 square inches, holds 7 ounces of snack. That means for every ounce of snack you’re throwing out 32 square inches of plastic. The smaller bag that holds 2 ounces is 115 ½ square inches. One ounce of snack from that bag would result in 57 ¾ square inches of plastic going into the trash. As they say, “You do the math!” When you do, you see that the big bag is better!

As you can see in this picture it’s pretty obvious that the large bag ends up being less trash than a number of smaller bags that would have to be bought to give us the same amount of snack.

If we want to reduce the amount of trash we have to try to buy things that do not create more trash. To reduce the amount of plastic thrown into the garbage from snack bags means buying the snacks in large bags instead of small bags. That holds true for all kinds of packages; the larger size package has less packaging per unit volume than the small package.

Of course now mom and dad won’t let you bring the whole 7 ounce bag to school for snack. How will you solve that problem? Will your solution create more trash? Let me know.

Circleville 4th Grade Ornithologist Study Owls

Owl ecology is one my most popular studies. I always find it very interesting. From the feedback that I get I know the students that I share this with find it as interesting as I do.

I don’t know how many pellets I have dissected with students over the years. Pellets Inc., the company that I buy pellets from (see link to the right), says I’m one of their best customers. Each time I take apart pellets with elementary school ornithologists it is like a treasure hunt – even though I have an idea of what I might find, there are sometimes surprises.

One of the surprises this year with the pellets that I dissected with Circleville Elementary School 4th grade ornithologists was the number of bird skeletons that we found. Out of the 50 pellets that we dissected there were 4 bird skeletons. That might not seem like a lot but if we look at some other data that I have collected over the last few years we do find something unusual.

What’s unusual? Let’s look at the data. Not including what we dissected at Circleville, I have helped students take apart 251 pellets. In all of those pellets we found a total of 7 birds. How does that compare to what we found in our latest investigation? In order to compare we need to do some math. By doing an average we find that for every 36 pellets we dissected we discover 1 bird skeleton. In this recent investigation we found 1 bird skeleton for every 13 pellets. That’s a rate of twice as many birds eaten by owls in our sample compared to all of the pellets in my studies in the last few years.

Why? I don’t really know, but I do have several hypothesis. I do find that there are at times patterns in how and what the owls are eating. For example in the spring I find that many of the pellets have extremely crushed bones. In those cases, you will not find any whole skulls in the pellets. They will all have been crushed into small pieces. I suspect that these pellets come from young owls. The parents may crush the mice up with their beaks to make it easier for the young to eat. Or maybe the young, being smaller in size or not being very experienced eaters end up crushing the prey as they eat it, more so than older adult owls would. This may be showing us an eating behavior demonstrated by owls. Maybe there are patterns that help to explain what they eat.

One pattern that I have noticed is that if you do get some of the secondary prey (i.e. shrews, moles or birds) you will likely get several pellets in a batch with that kind of prey. Why? Well, there might be a couple of reasons for this. One is that individual owls, just like any other animal (including us), can sometimes have certain foods that they particularly like (for you or me, we might like to eat one particular thing, for example lima beans). If we ended up with pellets from an owl that has an unusual food favorite, then we might see a greater number of that kind of prey. Maybe a particular owl is really good at catching an unusual kind of prey. Again, if we got pellets from that owl we'd have a greater number of that unusual prey. When I purchase the pellets I buy them in bulk. It's likely that several of the pellets come from the same owl. In that case we might get a higher number than expected of the secondary prey. That might be the reason for why we found twice the usual rate for bird predation with our owl pellets - we happened to get pellets from an owl that was particularly fond of or particularly good at catching birds for food.

Another reason is that the unusual prey may be more abundant or more easily caught at certain times of the year, for example there may be more shrew nests in the spring providing for more chances for owls to find them. Often you will find four or five shrews skulls in one pellet, in that case I’m quite sure that the owl heard the shrews in the nest, dove down and grabbed that spot in the leaves and in one swoop catch a whole family of shrews for dinner. In the fall young birds begin to disperse from where they hatched and are no longer being cared for by their parents. These young, inexperienced birds might be more easily preyed upon by owls. This might be the reason why we had such a high number of bird prey in our investigation.

As you can see the web of life is very complex. There are many interconnections between predator and prey. Seasonal changes can affect the number and availability of food. The behavior of prey at different times of the year can make them more available for the owls. All of these things can affect what the owls eat. When we dissect their pellets we can get a glimpse of their world.

Here is the data from the pellets we dissected with 4th graders at Circleville Elementary School:

Mrs. Urmston’s class – 10 pellets, 23 mice, 0 shrew, 0 mole, 1 bird
Mrs. Przybocki’s class – 10 pellets, 24 mice, 4 shrews, 0 mole, 0 bird
Mrs. Conklin’s class – 10 pellets, 21 mice, 0 shrew, 0 mole, 0 bird
Mrs. Herb’s class – 10 pellets, 21 mice, 1 shrew, 0 mole, 2 bird
Mrs. Negron’s class – 10 pellets, 30 mice, 0 shrew, 0 mole, 1 bird

Here’s a question. Were the number of shrews eaten by the owls in our study sample typical or average for owls based on what my previous investigations have shown (hint – look at the number of shrews eaten in all of the dissections I have done with students and compare to what we found yesterday)? E-mail me your answer. Good luck.