Have student use the eERL site to look for current treatments for neutralizing
hazardous substances before disposal.
Have students investigate current recycling technologies: glass, plastic,
aluminum.
a. Open-ended activity – have student calculate the energy saved in one of these
areas, glass, plastic or aluminum for a city, town or their own community.
Teacher’s note – information is out there and students are usually able to find
it.
Using information about in various sites, students should investigate the status
of their state’s landfills and calculate the expected life of these landfills.
a. Open-ended activity – discuss what should be done with trash, etc. if landfills
are closing, research new technologies or new uses for trash!
Make an attractive spider map of regulations that govern waste streams – cite
current regulations – be creative make it federal, state and local if you can
find some! Hang the map in the classroom for everyone to refer to during
discussions!
Search for the most hazardous chemical in your community. Use the digital
library to find current information about these chemical. Make a poster that
would inform others about these chemicals.
Research household chemicals that are hazardous and place in a chart with the
most hazardous first, indicate lethal dose, hazard class or division.
Your community is investigating the possibility of using incineration to dispose
of hazardous materials. Under what conditions and regulations does incineration
occur safely. Present your case to others in the class – use data obtained from
your database search.
Sharon Flanagan
Associate Professor of Biology
Coordinator Nunez’s Environmental Program sflanagan@nunez.edu
We require all the students to complete an extensive safety course as part of our curriculum. A significant part of
the course is devoted to a hazard communication program, as they are exposed to numerous chemicals while working in the
lab. I require them to find, summarize and submit 16 articles pertaining to workplace safety, regulatory and
legislative issues and anything pertinent to the industry. Half of these articles they must find from trade journals,
newspapers and internet websites. For the remainder of their article summaries, I gave them the ATEEC website and
allowed them to use information catalogued on the eERL site among others. What a relief for them to find the vast
array of topics and websites available for their use at (as they say) "your one stop shopping center".
1. Look up the list of chemicals emitted in the most recent TRI
report for students in the classroom. Also look at previous years to
see if there is a positive trend downwards.
a. Identify the companies who are releasing the chemicals.
b. Once that data is gathered, research the health effects of the
chemicals released to the air by looking up toxicity information on
various websites.
c. Evaluate the potential risk to any vulnerable population in the
area (children, pregnant women, elderly, etc.).
d. Research federal & state regulations which impact what can be
released, how much and permits required.
HOUSEHOLD HAZARDOUS WASTE
2. Have students take an inventory of every cleaning product used in
their homes. Develop a questionairre to determine how many
households are recycling the household product containers.
a. Compare that information with how much waste the local hauler
takes to the labfill vs recycling.
b. Research alternate non-hazardous cleaning products and publish a
newletter summarizing the information and distribute to the
populution which was surveyed.
FOOD SAFETY
3. Research the number of food safety alerts which have been issued
by the local health department.
a. Interview the local health dept officials about how the community
is informed about the safety alerts.
b. Survey families of the students to determine how many were aware
of the safety alerts.
c. Contrast the local data with national trends.
ALLIED HEALTH
4. Interview local dental clinics about the way mercury and other
biological hazards are handled. Use eERL to evalute toxicology,
hazardous waste treatment, alternatives for hazardous compounds
(mercury).
WORKER, HEALTH & SAFETY
5. Survey students for a list of occupations of their parents or
family members.
a. Evaluate the potential health hazards for the occupations
generated using the ATSDR databases.
b. Use multiple resources to evaluate toxicology information on
chemicals used in the occupations.
1. Determine if the water from a well supplying a home is safe to
drink.
a. What federal law (s) would apply?
b. What are the analytes of interest?
c. What EPA test methods must be used for testing the analytes of
interest?
HAZARDOUS WASTE
2. You are starting a new metals plating business. Identify
alternate technologies to recover waste metals.
REGULATORY
3. Define these terms are and discuss how they are related: Clean
Water Act, RCRA, CERCLA, TSCA, NEPA.
4. What are the "Valdez Principles" and how do they help investors
and corporations?
AIR POLLUTION
5. Compare air pollution levels for 3 cities with populations
greater than 500,000.
Gail Celaschi
QA/QC Specialist
The duration of many of these projects will depend on how much
detail/time the teacher chooses to allow. If needed, I can recommend
an "answer key" = the types of resources which are in ATEEL & eERL
which the students should have to use in order to successfully
complete these projects.
The Stith and Celaschi activities noted will utilize the following skills
(along with many others not listed):
Math: interpret & extroplate data, use histograms to show trends,
evaluate data, calculate statistics
Critical thinking: draw conclusions from a set of facts, make
comparative judgements, diagnose problems & suggest corrective
actions, identify, assimilate, integrate, evaluate information from
diverse sources
Communication: write reports, summarize data, use active listening
skills, display info with photos, spreadsheets, presentations
Computer: use Internet, use software programs, create spreadsheets,
graphs, etc. to display info.
1) Give a term such as "green house gases" and have the students search through broad subject categories
to find if and how the term relates to the specific subject area. So that the students see that there
are themes that relate environmental issues, that while we talk about global warming, alternative fuels,
automotive technology, agriculture, sustainability, air quality etc they are related through common
threads.
1a) This could be done a group project and groups could compete for the largest number of solid hits.
Each group would have to defend its hits to the other groups, so that if a challenge is made that the
site is only tangential (I'm assuming that no one would be stupid enough to list a site with no
connection) and not rebuffed that hit is lost and their score goes down. Highest scores get A's, second
B's etc.
2) Select a number of apparently unrelated sites and ask the students to identify the common theme. This
requires a certain amount of critical thinking and textual analysis to find that "green house gases" are
a common theme and explain the basis of the commonality.
2a) This would require the students to analyze the common theme that they found in the list of sites and
to explain the relationship between the theme and the sites, identifying common concerns and solutions
among groups of sites.
2b) This could also be done as a group activity, where each group provides the other groups with the list
of websites and challenges them to find the theme. They must provide a written outline to the instructor
of what the theme is and it has to be approved before competition begins. At that point each group gets
its set of challenges from the other groups and must identify the common themes and provide a more
detailed support for their analysis, which is compared to the outline for the basis of the grade.
3) Going the other direction, a student could be asked to find commonalities among a number of the broad
subject categories, then develop those into a series of themes by expanding the research into more
specifics and ultimately develop a single theme into diagram with the links in the diagram (done in an
electronic format so that it could be used as a reference tool with working links) which shows the cause,
effects, relation to policy, solutions, and technology. I see this as a semester long project with
multiple steps along the way for grading and advising.
See what slow roasting does for you.
