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| Welcome to The Recycle Challenge The Recycle Challenge is a project where students are challenged to begin a recycling program at their school. The Challenge, begun at Black Mountain Elementary School, was made possible by a grant from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and carried out over the 2002-2003 school year. The results of our work were presented at the end of the school year to the Cave Creek Unified School District Governing Board to convince them that recycling makes sense and should be implemented in all schools and offices in the Cave Creek Unified School District. The Challenge was driven by inquiry-based activities that engaged students in planning an effective recycling program, monitoring the plan's effectiveness through collection of data, and looking for evidence of the need to recycle in the world around them. The activities are linked to Arizona State Standards and were integrated into the classroom in support of the regular curriculum. The activities were intended for use primarily in grades 4-8 but involved students in all grade levels K-8 in the recycling effort. We have created this Web-based resource for use by other schools in Arizona that want to begin a recycling effort similar to ours. The guide is a series of activities that will help you set-up a Recycle Challenge at your school. It is organized in four basic sections that are organized in the following way:
The links below will take you to each section of The Recycle Challenge. Once you and your students have completed all (or parts of The Challenge) you will be able to create your own presentation to your school on your results. We've linked a copy of the PowerPoint presentation Black Mountain students created and presented to the Cave Creek Unified School District Governing Board for you to use as an example. You can also visit Black Mountain Elementary School's Recycle Challenge Web site to see the results of our work for 2002-2003. Please feel free to contact us if you would like more information or have questions about The Recycle Challenge. We would also like to hear from you about your recycling efforts so we can link samples of other schools' work to this Web site.
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| The Recycle Challenge - What's the Plan? Can you come up with a recycling plan to help your school recycle? Often you don't think about what you throw away. As a result many materials that can be recycled end up going into the garbage. In this part of The Recycle Challenge students answer the following questions:
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| The Recycle Challenge - What Can Nature Teach Us About Recycling? Can observing nature help you to understand the importance of recycling? If you keep your eyes open you can see how "the web of nature" is dependent on recycling to maintain its balance. In this part of The Recycle Challenge students answer these guiding questions:
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| The Recycle Challenge - How are We Doing? How effective is your recycling plan and can you improve it? There is always room for improvement in most plans. Careful observation and data analysis can help you to test how well a recycling plan is working. This will let you modify the plan if needed. In this part of The Recycle Challenge students look at data collected on their recycling efforts and answer these guiding questions:
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| The Recycle Challenge - How does technology improve our ability to recycle? Why do some people argue that it doesn't make sense to recycle because it costs too much? Technology plays an important part in our ability to recycle. Some thing's are not recycled because people haven't thought of an efficient way or reason to recycle. In this part of The Recycle Challenge students will look at how technology relates to recycling using the following guiding questions:
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