Recycling and Litter
Objectives:
Participants will:
 Be able to identify littering problems in their communities
 Understand the lifecycle of trash and recycling
 Identify what household items are recycled or can be recycled.
Materials:
 Note cards with interview questions on them
 Copies of text with statistics
 A copy of the recycling symbol handout for each participant
 Flip chart paper or blackboard for brainstorming and making lists together
 Several trash items in a paper bag
 Recycling handouts
Application:
Activity 1: Warm-up Interview (10 min.)
In two or more groups, participants have 5 minutes to answer questions about litter in
their towns.
Questions for warm-up activity:
What kinds of litter do you see most often in your town?
Where do you usually see litter?
What is an environmental concern for residents of Chernigiv?
How do the youth of Chernigiv spend their free time?
How do adult residents of Chernigiv spend their free time?
How do you think trash collection and the litter problems in Chernigiv will change in the
next five years? Will they get better or worse?
When groups are finished, the class discusses the answers. Do you think that these
answers are representative of Ukraine in general? What can towns do to stop people
from littering?
Read text as a group:
Throughout the world more waste is constantly being produced and these wastes pile up
in landfills and dump sites. The U.S. generally disposes of more waste per capita per year
than most countries in the world. More specifically, in 1970, Americans disposed of over
78.2 million tons of waste. In 1994 this figure increased to 95.6 million tons. Ukrainians
throw lots of things away. In 1980 in Ukraine 240 tons of waste was produced per capita.
This increased to 318 tons per capita in 1990, and 400 tons per capita in 1996. To give a
more specific example, the Cherkasiy dump already holds three times the amount of
waste that it was meant to hold, and it pollutes (poisons) the surrounding forest and
Dnipro River.
Activity 2: What is recycling? Can anyone draw the recycling symbol? (10 min.)
Hand out worksheets of the international recycling symbols and discuss what they mean.
Reduce – to use less
Re-use – to use the same product again
Recycle – to use an old product to make a new product
Decompose – to disintegrate, or break up after environmental action
Give the students a handout with the following information and ask them to read it (5
min.):
1. It takes more than 500,000 trees to make the newspapers Americans read on one
Sunday.
2. If people from the 1700s had used aluminum cans, the cans would still be around
today!
3. Making a recycled aluminum can uses only 5% of the energy required to make a
new one.
4. Product packaging is 30% of the weight and 50% of the volume of trash from our
homes.
5. 10% of the money we pay for food pays for packaging.
6. A plastic cup can take 50-80 years to decompose.
7. When you recycle 1 aluminum can, you save enough energy to run a 100-watt
light bulb for about 3 and a half hours.
8. There is nothing we can do as individuals to help our environment.
Have the students discuss this information in groups and place each fact under the
heading “True” or “False.” After the students decide which facts are true and which are
false, reveal to them that all of the facts (except the last one) are true. Ask students what
they learned from this. Is there any way to stop making more trash? What ideas do you
have to make the amount of trash we produce less? Introduce the 3 R’s (Reduce, Re-use,
Recycle). Explain that these ideas can help us to make trash less of a problem in our
cities.
Reduce – to use less trash. How can we do this? What can you buy so that you use less
packaging?
Re-use – How can you use items again? What are good things to use many times and not
throw away after one use?
Recycle – What can you recycle?
Activity 3: The World’s Most Important Thing (10 min.)
Break the class into 5 groups of 3–5 people. In a non-transparent bag, place trash items,
such as an empty ½ liter bottle, a broken CD, an old spray bottle, an old shirt/piece of
fabric, and a used toothbrush. Ask each team to pick out 1 item from the bag. When each
team has an item, announce the game, “The World’s Most Important Thing.”
The object of this game is to think of as many uses as possible for the object that you
have, and to argue why it is the world’s most important thing. To help students, ask them
to first write about all of the qualities of the item. For example:
What is it made of? Is it strong or weak? What parts does it have? What shape is it? What
color is it? Is it heavy or light? Can it bend? Etc.
After the students have generated a list of the item’s qualities, tell them to think about
how it can be used differently. After all groups have had time to do this, ask one person
(or more) from each group to come to the front of the room and explain to the other
students how their object can be used. After a team speaks, the other team will award
them points from 1 to 5 for how good their ideas were. The team with the most points
wins.
Recycling and Litter: Additional
Resources