How science can excite children

(Part 2 of a series on The Earthsavers Mission)

The expression "She eats like a bird", when applied to people who eat very little, is inaccurate. Birds use up so much energy, they are always hungry. In one day, birds can eat 4/5 of their own weight. Imagine all the insects and plants that they feed on. When birds die, their bodies disintegrate into the soil. Their bodies are biodegradable matter – organic or living matter which goes back to the earth.

Biodegradable experiments

‘Back to the Earth’ or biodegradable is a catch phrase of the Save the Earth campaign. Bio means life, while degradable means to break down. Through a simple experiment, you can distinguish which things disintegrate and which do not.

Get a one-inch chunk of singkamas, sayote, kangkong leaves, a small plastic bag, and a piece of a Styrofoam sandwich box. Dig four holes in the ground and bury each object. Mark them so you can find them again. After a month, dig them up. You will have no trouble finding the plastic and Styrofoam, but the kangkong and maybe the piece of singkamas will be gone. The warmer and moist the ground, the quicker the kangkong and singkamas will disappear. This is because they are biodegradable. They become part of the earth again, in order to help more kangkong and singkamas and other plants grow.

How long does litter last? Statistics show that a piece of paper takes a month, a cotton or woolen socks — a year, and a softdrink aluminum can over 200 years to disintegrate. Leftover food or kanin baboy is another thing. It need not be thrown away. Besides collecting it for animal feed, you can turn it back to rich fertile soil. Mixed with green leaves, grass cuttings or garden waste, the food scraps can make a compost. This biodegradable garbage is organic. That means "made out of either plants or animal matter".

1,200 pounds of kitchen waste

More than half of the trash the family throws away every year is organic. It is observed that a household tosses out 1,200 lbs. of organic garbage every year or 12 times the weight of a 100-lb person. Therefore, if we compost the garbage, we would resolve our big trash problem.

Here is what a parent or teacher can do: dig a special rectangular pit in a corner of your garden. Put your organic garbage there with grass cuttings. Turn it over once in a while. Watch it slowly become part of the earth again. But, the greatest composters are your fat, pink garden worms.

Place your kitchen waste in a wet bed of peat moss eight inches deep in a two-foot square wooden box. NO SHELLS, BONES, OR FAT, PLEASE ! Then, stand back. The worms will eat the rotting garbage and convert it into the richest soil.

To be foolproof add BOKASHI POWDER available at the North Greenhills Administration Office, Johnson Park, North Greenhills, San Juan (tel. nos. 7221841, 7221776).

Non-biodegradable

What do we do with the non-biodegradable or inorganic trash like bottles, aluminum softdrink cans, foil, plastic bottles or cups, and Styrofoam boxes? We can RECYCLE or PRECYCLE them.

In Europe, America and Japan bottles and aluminum cans are brought back to their original manufacturer, broken into little bits, melted, and made into new bottles and cans. In the Philippines, since only drink bottle companies and some private groups do this, recycling is mostly done by the people. This means that they use things AGAIN AND AGAIN. Do you know that recycling one glass bottle uses energy that could light a 100-watt bulb for four hours?

Let your son play a game of ‘Bottle Bandit’. Ask him to collect all the household bottles and put them in empty boxes. He can earn money by selling these to the kariton boys of the Metro Manila Linis Ganda or the Chinese junk dealer every month. School children can also be mobilized. The principal can tell them to stack all their empty plastic cups in empty rice sacks that are hanging in busy corners of the playground or cafeteria. Empty aluminum snack bags should be thrown in a separate receptacle. The schools can send the cups to farms in Negros, where they can serve as pots for germinating seeds.

‘Bayong’ or cloth bag brigade

Precycling means buying things in packages which can be re-used or are made of recycled materials, such as gray egg carton boxes. Avoid Styrofoam, a material used for throwaway cups and ‘food to go’ boxes from fastfood chains.

Imagine how thousands of young grade school students of a school can form a "bayong" brigade to a huge supermarket and do the weekly family purchase, then refuse the plastic bag offered at the cashier stand saying, "I do not want to add to the inorganic garbage that hurts the earth." Stagger the ‘field trip’ schedule as we did at the Greenhills supermarket.

Pet pests

How many dogs and cats are there in our neighborhood? It makes you itchy just watching a dog or cat scratch at fleas. There are a lot of ways to get rid of fleas — like flea collars and flea powders. But many of them are not very good for you, your pet or the Earth because they contain poisons called pesticides. Some are even suspected of causing cancer.

Most fleas don’t live on your pet, they live in your house. About 4/5 of them are always hidden in rugs and in the cracks of your floors. So, trying to get rid of the fleas in your dog or cat without also doing something to get rid of the fleas in your house doesn’t make sense.

Give your pet lots of baths with soap and water, which drowns fleas. Use a ‘flea comb’ — a special comb with teeth so close together that the fleas get caught in it. Dip the comb in a bowl of soapy water whenever you catch a flea. The flea will drop into the water and die.

When you go to a pet store, look at the labels of all the flea-killers they sell. You won’t be able to understand most of what they say, but you will see a warning on most of them. If they have some dangerous chemicals on them, use them every once in a while in small amounts only – but, if you can avoid them, it is better for you and your pet.

Be a water leak detective

Calling all kids! Be on the lookout for hidden water leaks in your house. They are behind the walls, faucets, toilets, and even outside with your dripping garden hose.

You can be a Water-Leak Mathematician. To figure out how much water leaks from your hose, imagine for instance, a faucet leak that fills a coffee cup in 10 minutes. This will waste over 3,000 gallons of water a year or 65 glasses of water every day for a year.

Some 20 percent of all toilets are leaking right now and people do not even know it. In one year, a leaky toilet can waste over 22,000 gallons of water – enough for taking three baths a day! Check your toilet. Get an adult to take the top off the toilet tank in your home. Then, put about 12 drops of red or blue food coloring in the tank. Wait for about 15 minutes making sure that no one uses the toilet. Now, look in the toilet. If colored water shows up in the bowl, you have found a leak!

Ask your parents to teach you how to read the water meter, if you have one. Then, pick a time when everyone is out of the house and no one is using the water. Before everyone leaves, read the water meter and write down its setting. Then, when you get back home, take another reading. If the numbers have changed, your house probably has a leak. Tell your parents about it. Every little leak hurts!

Rural artesian wells

More than half of our countrymen pump water from artesian wells or haul them in cans to brush their teeth or take a bath. When they are employed as housekeepers or laundrywomen in households with running water, they get culture shock. With one turn of the faucet — presto — water flows like the river in their village where they used to wash clothes. It is so easy to get water, they let gallons flow down the drain without thinking.

Do you know that if you leave the water running while you brush your teeth, you can waste five gallons of water? That’s enough to fill 13 cans of soda. When you brush your teeth, just wet your toothbrush, then turn off the water… then, turn it on again when you need to rinse your toothbrush and gurgle. You will save up to nine gallons of water each time – enough to give your pet a bath.

If you do the same while washing dishes, you can waste 30 gallons of water, or enough to take a five-minute shower. To avoid wastage, just fill up a basin and rinse dishes in it, do not let the water run.

Toilet talk

To conclude, let us have some ‘toilet talk’. Where does most drinkable water in your house go? To the toilet. We use more water there than anywhere else in our homes. Most toilets use more water than they need to. Here are some water saver tips.

Each time you flush, you use three to six gallons of water. Put something in the toilet tank to take up space, such as a tightly covered plastic jug filled with rocks and water to make it heavy. I use two empty large whiskey or patis bottles. Be sure it does not disturb the chain that enables the toilet to flush. Now, every time you flush, you can save one to two gallons of water.

Be kids’ heroes of the environment

Mark, a Grade 3 student, had read about conservation programs and had started recycling at home. But at his school, there was no recycling program. "At school, we were not doing anything," he says. "In my class, kids throw away about 8 pieces of paper a day. Some with only few marks on them." Mark didn’t want to let things keep on going that way. He figures that even if he could get just his class recycling, it would help. So he wrote a letter to the school principal about starting a recycling program. In return, the principal gave him a thank you note and the school started recycling. Now, all classes in his school recycle white and colored paper.

Mark was so inspired by the success of the school recycling program that he thought of something else to do. There used to be litter scattered in his condominium building, maintenance people had been hired to clean it up. Mark thought that kids living in the building could do a better job, so he asked the manager to hire the children instead. "We are paid for every garbage bag we fill up," Mark said. "And, now we have a neat-looking place!"

Write to environmental organizations

If you really care about the earth, and wish to do something about it with your friends, get involved with an environmental organization:

• Earth First, P.O. Box 6, Ottery St. Mary, Devon, EX111 1YL, Tel. (00-1) (404) 815729

• Greenpeace International, Ottho Heldringstraat 5, 1066 AZ Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Tel. (00) (3120) 7182000, Fax (00) (3120) 5148151, E-mail address: HYPERLINK "mailto: sup [email protected]" [email protected]

(Next week: Get Involved — Write to World Leaders, Part 3)

(For more information or reaction, please e-mail at [email protected] or [email protected])