Recycling, Climate Change, and Youth

How young is too young to learn about greenhouse gas emissions, Life Cycle Analysis, and embodied energy?

This past Monday I had the opportunity to present these concepts to a group of 40 5th graders at Brickett Elementary School in Lynn, Massachusetts.  Their teacher, Donna Whalen, had invited me a couple months back to talk about recycling or climate change.  She and her class wanted to learn more about different environmental issues so that they could develop a public project to work on.  This was no small thing.

Mrs. Whalen and her industrious students are known regionally and nationally for their environmental activities. This past spring, Mrs. Whalen's 5th grade class won the Disney Planet Challenge for their project “Think Before You Idle,” which was an effort to decrease needless vehicle idling in Lynn. Their local initiative not only reduced this pernicious source of toxic air pollution near schools, it sent her and her students on a four-day trip to Disney World. Last year, Mrs. Whalen's 4th graders launched a campaign to educate residents about the need for rain barrels and convinced a local cable company to donate the use of one of its billboards to spread their message. The campaign earned them a visit by the Mayor of Lynn, and an official declaration of Monday as Rain Barrel Day in Lynn.  Two years ago, Mrs. Whalen's 4th grade class was recognized with a River Stewardship Award, and a state legislative citation, for their efforts to promote water conservation in Lynn and throughout the state. In fact, I first learned about Mrs. Whalen and her amazing students through a casual conversation with a member of the Saugus River Watershed Council during a regional climate change adaptation planning meeting convened by the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council. This individual gushed about Mrs. Whalen and her students.

I'm not generally used to interacting with anyone younger than my cat (i.e. college aged), but this opportunity presented an interesting challenge. I could have talked either about recycling or climate change, but I offered to talk about the connections between these two important issues.

The main link between recycling and climate change is energy.  It takes less energy to make products from recycled materials than from virgin materials (a lot less in the case of aluminum).  The amount of energy expended in making products is significant because most of the energy we use (for heating, electricity, transportation, manufacturing) comes from burning fossil fuels (e.g. coal, oil, natural gas).   Using less energy means that we produce less carbon dioxide (CO₂) - the primary greenhouse gas implicated in human-driven climate change. Other greenhouse gases, such as methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O), are also reduced in certain cases as a result of reduced use of chemical manufacturing processes. Greenhouse gas emissions are the primary issue in global climate change. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have the property of allowing sunlight to enter the atmosphere (kind of like the glass of a greenhouse), while blocking (or retarding) the escape of heat back into space (kind of like a global blanket).  This "greenhouse effect" is a natural process, but human industrial activity over the past two centuries has released a lot more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than is normal (more than has been seen in 800,000 years), meaning that a lot more heat than normal has been retained in the atmosphere.  As a result, the world is warming, the climate is changing, and we are experiencing all kinds of hard-to-predict and often undesirable environmental changes.

In the spirit of show and tell, I showed and told my presentation using a few simple props: a glass drinking bottle, a plastic drinking bottle, an aluminum can, and a newspaper.  We talked about the life cycle of each of these products: how they are created (e.g. did you know plastic is made from oil and natural gas?), how they are used, and what can happen to them after we are done with them.  In each case, we identified the resource consumption (e.g. trees, minerals) and the energy use and the greenhouse gases emissions that happen in each phase of a product's life (e.g. did you know it takes 95% less energy to make aluminum cans from recycled aluminum?).  Recycling (as I showed them in a PowerPoint slide), changes the lives of these products in significant ways: reducing natural resource consumption (e.g. did you know it takes 17 trees to make one ton of newspaper?), saving landfill space, reducing energy use, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As a final exercise, we walked through the process of actually calculating the greenhouse emissions that could be prevented if their school recycled all of the glass bottles it consumed. For this last exercise, I had prepared a simple worksheet (although not so simple to produce!) that allowed them to input their own values.

I have to admit that as the day of my presentation approached, I grew increasingly nervous that my lesson plan would be too complex, or worse, too boring.  I am happy to report that my fears were groundless.  These students were really there with me the whole time.  They listened eagerly and had lots of really good, clarifying questions.  Which recycled product has the biggest impact on energy and greenhouse emissions? The least?  If plastic is made from oil, is it possible to get that oil back?  How do all those tons of gasses stay up in the atmosphere?  I was equally impressed by what they already knew - about natural resource consumption, about recycling, about pollution. When we walked through the exercise to calculate their school's greenhouse gas emissions from glass consumption, they called out the answers at each step, and even corrected me when I made a couple of mathematical mistakes. Whoa.

I feel compelled to point out that these students are from a largely non-White, and low income community. These are not privileged kids - or at least not from a socioeconomic perspective. They are, however, clearly advantaged by the quality of this teacher and this institution.

These young people (e.g. 8 - 9 years old) are also clearly capable of understanding and engaging with complex environmental topics.  They need to be.  The social and environmental challenges that face us will undoubtedly span generations, and these young people will inherit these problems, as will their children.  I am hoping that this type of education, and its level of sophistication, can become the new norm.  Understanding the importance of environmental stewardship the way we understand and teach about the importance of washing our hands - something based on decades of complex, scientific research, but in the end comes down to a simple idea: it's good for our own health and welfare and those around us.