Part of Lesson Plan: Animal Waste

Activity Overview / Details

When students enter the room they should be greeted by four heaping piles of trash collected from the school trash cans located at their tables or lab stations.  As students enter the room, count them off into four separate groups, have them select a pair of latex/rubber gloves, and take a seat by their group's pile of trash. Deliver the following contextual/direction set:

Good morning( afternoon) ladies and gentlemen! Today on my daily walk around campus I couldn't help but notice how full our trashcans are, and it's only (state the name of the period or the time of the day).  I figured as I was walking that I would save the janitor some trouble, and that we as a class could help determine what in these trashbags was truly "trash", and what could be recycled and used again.  When I say "dive", your groups will have 10 minutes to separate the real "trash" from those items that we can reuse.  All "trash will need to be placed in the empty black trash bag near your station, and all items that can be recycled will be placed in the white bag underneath that. What questions are there? "Dive"

Allow the groups time to dig through the items, and make sure they truly are getting every recyclable item that is in their heap.  Give audible time updates, but do not move on until each group has their heap of trash filled into their two bags. Once every group has completed the task, process the activity with them.

What just happened? **We sorted garbage, Found items to recycle, Got dirty, etc.

What is important about what we just did? **Helped the janitor, cleaned up campus, found "trash" that we could turn into money.

What do you mean we can make our garbage into money? **You can recycle and they pay you

EXACTLY! Obviously, we has humans make waste.  You have been up to your neck in your own waste for the last 15 minutes.  If we hadn't of gone through our trash, we would have literally been throwing money into the dump by not fetching those recyclable materials.  Just like we have to identify what of our waste is truly "trash", and what can be reused - agriculturalists are coming to a point where they must do the same for their operations. 

Today, we are going to take a look at the types of waste that can be created by animal agriculture operations.  Taking it a step further, we are going to look into ways that the "waste" that is created can be used by agricultural operations to decrease input costs, and increase the bottom line for many agricultural operations!