Educational Resources and Activities

CVWMA is all about regional recycling education. Visit us on Pinterest too. Check out these some of these online educational resources and activities for students in kindergarten through high school include:

Educational Resources



50 Interesting Recycling Facts

Recycling matters. This blog offers 50 interesting recycling facts. We all can rethink waste and reduce our impact. Visit blog.   

Recycle Right With CVWMA

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. The CVWMA website is a plethora of information on recycling and solid waste management programs offered to residents that live within CVWMA’s 13 member local governments service area. Visit website.   

Journey To the MRF

CVWMA staff worked with TFC Recycling, Richmond Flying Squirrels (Nutzy),  R3, Jonathan Austin and Matt McClain, CBS 6 to create this video/virtual “field trip” inside TFC’s Material Recovery Facility (or MRF) located in Chester, VA.  Watch video.  

How Recycling Works

Watch how garbage can be recycled and made into new things instead of being landfilled by SciShowKids. Watch video.

Recycle Aluminum & Steel Cans

Aluminum cans and steel cans are recyclables forever! Watch Discovery/Science Channel video on process for making aluminum cans. Watch video.

How Stuff Works- Recycling Aluminum – watch video.  

Recycle Glass Bottles & Jars

NPR’s “How a Used Bottle Becomes a New Glass Bottle”. *Watch video. (Permission given by NPR) 

Recycle Cardboard and Mixed Paper

True/False or Multiple Choice Questions.

• Did You Know? Recycled Paper Fun facts
• Paper A

Environment Education Resources: Litterati and Daily STEM

Check out these resources TED-ED created for World Cleanup Day 2020.

• Fast Food (K-12 Lesson Plans). Discover how much litter gets created by fast food packaging that people buy every day where you live. What solutions can you come up with to reduce waste created by packaging?
• What is Litter? After a litter cleanup, use the Litterati App tagging function to learn about different categories of litter and the difference between litter vs. waste. Check out the Litterati app challenges K-12, too.
• Creative Writing: Every piece of litter has a story.
• These resources are designed for school, classroom, home school, or self directed learning. Visit http://edu.litterati.org/

A Landfill is No Dump!

Landfills are the most common forms of waste disposal and are an important component of an integrated waste management system. A landfill is a large area of land that is specifically designed and built to receive municipal solid waste. “Where does your trash go?” Find out, if you don’t know by visiting your local landfill or view online a “virtual tour” of the Henrico County Springfield Road Landfill Podcast #42 by the Virginia Trekkers. What would your family do if your trash was not picked up every week? What would happen to your garbage (and the garbage of everyone else in your area) if the landfill closed? What happens to a landfill when it is full? What does it mean to recycle and why it is important to keep recycables out of landfills? How long does it take for different items to decompose?

Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: Facts and Figures

Everything you would ever want to know about solid waste from the US EPA.

Educational Materials on Solid Waste

• The EPA’s Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery provides educational material’s for promoting an increased knowledge of solid waste issues, with emphais on waste reduction, reuse, and recycling for K-12 students. It also informs teachers about student award programs and grants, as well as references, tools, and data students can use in environmental research projects and reports.
• EPA Curriculum
• Resources Grade K-5
• Resources Grade 6-8
• Resources Grades 9-12
• Additional Resources
• Roadside Litter Decomposition Chart
• EPA’s Waste and Recycling Resources for Teachers

Trash, Trash and More Trash- An Overview

In this lesson students will investigate a bag of trash to find out how much of the contents of the bag actually needs to go to the landfill. Students will create two class posters that show which items are recycable and which ones are not. They will complete a math activity to determine how many bags of trash their families generate.

A Trashy Timeline: Where Does our Garbage Go?

We all make way too much garbage. According to the US EPA Americans generate about 4.5 pounds of garbage (trash) everyday. Landfills keep filling up and people/local governments keep looking for more places to dispose of all of that garbage.

Virginia Trekkers

The Virginia Trekkers are Henrico County (VA) Public Schools technology educators that “trek” across Virginia creating hands-on learning and “virtual field trips” for students (and adults) on a variety of subjects. Their website offers a plethora of subject materials complete with video and online lessons.

CVWMA was most fortunate to partner with the “Trekkers” on two videos.

Podcast #17 is a partnership with TFC Recycling and CVWMA  lets you see firsthand how items collected at the curb or a CVWMA drop-off collection site are taken to a local “MRF” (Materials Recovery Facility) to be sorted and processed so that new materials can be made from recyclables. (Note: CVWMA now accepts more items than we did when this video was made.)

View Virginia Trekkers Podcast # 17 (Recycling)

Podcast # 42 and its companion Journey Through a Landfill activity guide is a partnership with CVWMA, Henrico County Department of Public Utilities/Division of Solid Waste and Recycling,  and Keep Henrico Beautiful. The Virginia Trekkers will show viewers what happens to your trash after you throw it in the garbage can/cart. See where all it goes!

Students can see where their garbage goes as well as what items could be recycled. No one really knows if glass takes a million years to decompose. It is an educated guess. By doing this exercise with relative decompostion times, students will create a visual representation of the time it takes for various waste items left in a landfill to breakdown or decompose. It will get them to start thinking about all of their “stuff”. Discover how trash is turned into electricity and learn what you can do to reduce the amount of garbage/trash you send to the landfill. It’s an exciting place with lots to explore! Don’t miss the Trekkers interactive “Building a Landfill” activity as well as the phethora of educational links provided at the top header of the Podcast.

View Virginia Trekkers Podcast # 42 (Henrico Landfill)

• One of the Virginia Trekkers (Frank) has a podcast/video on Watersheds, click here to view.

The Quest for Less: Activities and Resources for Teaching K-8

• This resource provides downloadable hands-on lessons and activities, enrichment ideas, journal writing assignments, and other educational tools related to preventing and reusing waste.

Educator’s Guide to Planning a Field Day Event

• An innovative, easy and fun way to incorporate environmental learning, creative thinking and physical education in an SOL-based one-day event. We also have 30 Buddy Style stations that is easy to incorporate.

Buy, Use, Toss- A Closer Look at the Things We Buy Education Curriculum

• 9-12th grades (free download)
• Buy, Use, Toss? A Closer Look at the Things We Buy is an interdisciplinary unit that includes ten fully-planned lessons. This unit is correlated with national science and social studies standards and will lead your students through an exploration of the system of producing and consuming goods that is called the materials economy. Students will learn about the five major steps of the materials economy; Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption, and Disposal. They will also be asked to analyze the sustainability of these steps, determining how consumption can benefit people, economies, and environments

Recycling Partnership K-5 Recycling Curriculum

Offers recycling curriculum grades K-5 that can be downloaded from their website for teaching the importance of recycling to our future recyclers.

Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI) Educational Curriculum

• You must register in order to download the curriculum. Great free educational video:  What’s One Can?
• ABCs of EE for grades 4-6
• Talkin’ Trash with ABCs for grades 6-9
• Cans: Infinitely Recycable for High School students

NASA’s Climate Kids: Recycle This!

Explore NASA’s STEM website.  Also, they have recycle game, If you throw a plastic bottle in the trash today, the bottle will sit in a landfill- or worse, float in the ocean-for thousands of years. Use the “Airburst” tool to guide the recyclables into the proper bins before they fall into the trash created by NASA’s Climate Kids. Click here to play game.

Preschool Recycling Activity

Keep Henrico Beautiful (KHB) created this easy recycling lesson that is perfect for preschool and kindergarden age children. For instructions and patterns, click here

Tissue Company Offers FREE Lessons for Teachers

Marcel Manufacturing LLC, which makes 100% recycled tissue products, is offering free lesson plans to help teach students about waste, recycling, climate change and deforestation.

Visit Site

PlanetPals

Access more than 350 pages of educational materials. Teachers will find lesson plans and activities on ecology, recycling, and global warming as well as ideas for celebrating earth Day.

Visit Site

Students Guide to Composting

Composting in the Classroom: Scientific Inquiry for High School Students, by Nancy Trautmann and Marianne Krasny, is a comprehensive guide for teachers interested in guiding composting research projects by high school students.

PLT’s Exploring Environmental Issues: Municipal Solid Waste

The module uses hands-on experiences to show the interrelationships among waste generation, natural resource use, and disposal. The activities guide students through waste management strategies and solutions while providing the necessary tools to make informed decisions and choices on waste management issues.

 Living in Your Watershed

Learn about the watershed that you live in and how simple actions that you can easily do to to take care of it.

Air & Waste Management

Download free lesson plans from the Air & Waste Management Association.  Topics include air pollution, water pollution and landfills.