PBLGroup3Fall2013

Provides students with some ideas or techniques that might work to separate their mixture of recyclable materials. The website reviews evaporation, distillation, magnetism, and filtration.

This website gives the density, melting, and boiling points of various common solid materials. The students could use this site as they are trying to decide on which physical properties to use to separate recyclable materials from a mixture of trash.

This site lists ways plastic bottles can be reused. These examples reduce the amount of plastic we use in our daily lives and promote ways to be more friendly with the environment.

This Ted Talk by Charles Moore is an educational video about how plastic is recycled and where it ends up. He explains how our plastic and trash that ends up in the ocean forms the Eastern Garbage Patch. He also provides statistics and how this dilemma affects our environment.

Do you know how long it takes a plastic bottle to decompose? How about a leather shoe? This site gives a fun activity that you can follow and discover just how long it takes for some materials to decompose.

Check out some facts about littering to help you understand why recycling is so important to EVERYONE!

This site give some ideas of how to organize a community recycling program. 

Recycling success story.  Details the success of a Florida community recycling program.  

A recycling success story.  Details of how an Oregon community found success with its recycling program. 

This resource gives reasons why recycling is good for the community. Excellent resource for justifying recycling in the community.

This is a catchy song that will help the students remember the differences between physical and chemical properties. They need to think about various properties in order to determine how materials can be separated during the recycling process.

This site has information and considerations when starting a recycling program.

This video shows the different recycling symbols and provides examples of objects that contain these symbols.

This site has the different categories of objects we can recycle. It also provides how to recycle and where certain objects can be recycled based on your location.

Boulder CO single stream recycling center tour.  Elementary appropriate, the tour is given by an animated aluminum can.  

Tour of Philadelphia WM single stream recycling facility.  Good images/analogies.  Shows the sorting process for single stream recycling.

Specifically discusses the use of float tanks to sort plastic type by density. Interesting 2:44 video on corn plastics.

Guide to plastic recycling symbols... just what do those numbers mean.

More on single stream recycling. There are several good video clips on this site as well as flyers and informational items

This site explains how single stream recycling separator machines work. Very detailed diagram and explanation.