Recycling Green Waste

Palmerston North Intermediate Normal School

Year 8, 2007.

Immersion Activities

• Brainstorming ways to measure the non-paper waste at school
• Collecting and sampling waste generated at lunch times
• Brainstorming a series of recycling strategies

Focusing the Inquiry

Using a class vote the inquiry was focused to investigate the use of a worm farm to dispose of green waste.

• Brainstormed what we knew about worms
• Setup an information plan to boost our knowlegde using
  
  • an expert
  • the Internet
  • the Library

The local expert was invaluable and provided a huge amount of information

• brainstormed about how to set up a commercial worm farm
• Decided to work in groups
  
• Developed a investigation based on:

To investigate the optimum food preparation for feeding worms in order to consume the maximum amount of waste.

Investigation

A series of fair tests where developed, with a common set of variables that stayed the same:

• Worm farm box
• 300 g of Tiger worms
  
• Standard bedding
• Common location of each worm farm

Each of the 6 groups varied the food preparation and food combinations

• Group1: Four way feeding system, with different amounts and frequency of food and wet newspaper Group 2: Minced up food and newspaper
  
• Group 3: Minced up food with equal weight of sawdust
• Group 4: Cubes of hand cut home waste and newspaper
  
• Group 5: hand ripped lettuce
• Group 6: Four way feeding with varing rates of decompostion - from fresh to mouldy.

Observations were recorded weekly over a 10 week investigation

Newspaper wasn't consumed ad created a air impervious layer. Groups cut back onthe use of newspaper.

Discoveries

1. The more finely chopped the food the quicker it is eaten
2. Sawdust aerates the food
3. Soaked paper took far to longer to consume
4. Feeding smaller amounts over a larger surface resulted in the most amount of waste being consumed
5. Worms could consume twice there body weight daily and brees 'prolifically'.

Student Outcomes

Worked coopertatively and independantly

Task focused

'Massive' learning across the entire class

The gap between the students that learnt the least and the most was small.

No student performed badly or learnt little from the experience

"This was a highly successful learning experience that saw quality learning in place. Would I do it again, absolutely! I do think that the key is spending the time setting up the inquiry, setting the base and the direction. I think that the teacher does need to help point the students in a direction as this helps the students gain more from the experience as they are motivated by the vision of a successful outcome. Personally I liked the fact that this particular inquiry was mainly a science based inquiry with science based outcomes. I find that often the science in these inquiries is lost to the social science aspect of sustainability and recycling/ human decision making."