ISRI at Your Service: Investing in the Industry’s Future

September/October 2015

ISRI’s K-12 curriculum pays many dividends: It promotes recycling awareness, helps develop the future workforce, and lets recyclers support STEM education.

By Rachel H. Pollack

In a small hotel conference room in Staten Island, N.Y., more than two dozen teachers from the borough’s schools have an assignment: Create a graph showing the proportions of seven categories of materials in an iPad—display glass, other glass, aluminum, other metals, plastics, circuitboard, and battery—using the data on a screen at the front of the room.

The teachers turn to their laptop computers or paper notepads and get to work. Some laptop users launch Microsoft Excel, type in the data, and use it to generate a bar chart or a pie graph. Others show the group how you can do the same directly in Microsoft PowerPoint. Still others take the old-fashioned route, doing the math on paper and drawing the chart or graph by hand. The immediate lesson is mathematics: how to calculate percentages and how to display data graphically. The larger context, however, is that of electronics recycling: What do common electronic products contain? The lesson plan goes on to address whether those materials have a value or an end-of-life management cost.

This exercise is from a scrap-recycling-focused curriculum for K-12 students ReMA created with the nonprofit JASON Learning (Ashburn, Va.). The multiyear partnership, which launched in 2011, has produced the curriculum, additional resources and activities for students, and community outreach guidance for ReMA members and chapters. The 2015-2016 school year may be the first time all of the many pieces come together in the classroom.

Taking the Long View
A recycling curriculum can’t solve the industry’s immediate problems, but it could secure the industry’s future more broadly, say those involved in its development. “Part of ISRI’s mission is to educate and raise awareness about the industry, and what better way [to do that] than to get to people when they’re young, when they’re in school?” asks Robin Wiener, ISRI’s president. The curriculum can help students understand “the depth and breadth of recycling” beyond the blue household recycling bin, she says. “If we can help them understand all the different facets of the industry, how recycling works, the opportunities, the challenges … the industry’s better off.”

As ReMA Chair Doug Kramer, president of Kramer Metals (Los Angeles), puts it, “The children today that are getting the curriculum and growing up understanding the inherent value of what we do, those are the people who will be enforcing and regulating us in the future.”

Such exposure is important, too, for ensuring the industry can find workers with the right skills and education. Even though the scrap recycling industry employs nearly 150,000 people, most people “don’t know or understand what type of jobs are available,” says Tom Knippel, commercial vice president for SA Recycling (Orange, Calif.). Knippel was chair of ISRI’s Communications Committee when the project launched and continues to chair the School Curriculum Subcommittee. The partnership with JASON exposes students at all grade levels to the wide variety of recycling jobs. The hope, he says, is that some might choose recycling as a career path.

That career might require an advanced degree in engineering, chemistry, economics, metallurgy, or business, but the industry also needs mechanics, truck drivers, and those with other skills that are “as important—there’s nothing diminished about a guy or a girl who can work with their hands,” Kramer says. “Those are very, very important people.” The curriculum, he adds, is also “a tool to show we’re a good industry to work for—that we’re exciting, we’re vibrant, we’re dynamic, we’ve got cool machines.”

Educational Expertise
Robert D. Ballard, an oceanographer and explorer best known for discovering the wreck of the Titanic, founded JASON Learning—named for the mythical Greek explorer—in 1989 to inspire and educate children through real science and exploration. It has developed curricula on scientific topics including energy, weather, ecology, physics, and geology, with lessons that align with national and state standards for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and Common Core requirements.

Partnering with JASON appealed to ReMA for several reasons, Wiener says, most notably its expertise in standards-based curriculum development. If you search online for recycling education, she says, you’ll find tons of resources such as cartoons, handbooks, or online games. “We needed to rise above that and do something that was credible, strong, [and] met national standards so teachers would accept it.”

The curriculum also needs to be easy for teachers to access and use because “they’re as time-crunched and resource-limited as everyone else,” Wiener says. This puts everything they need in one place. In addition to the K-12 lesson plans, background reading, and worksheets, the lessons come with ideas for student research and experiments, videos, interactive online elements, and “STEM role models”—profiles of individuals working in the industry.

“The schools are hungry for resources, and this is a very easy program to deliver. And it doesn’t cost anything” for the teachers and schools to use it, Wiener notes. All the curricular materials are free and posted on the JASON and ReMA websites (www.jason.org and www.isri.org/jason). JASON even designed the experiments to use materials readily available in a classroom or at home. The partnership allows ReMA to take advantage of JASON’s distribution network—the many teachers and students who have registered to use its site.

Although JASON works with a wide range of partners—the National Geographic Society (Washington, D.C.), NASA (Washington, D.C.), and Chevron (San Ramon, Calif.) among them—it had never before worked with a trade association, Wiener says. The ReMA staff went through a lengthy process of reviewing various options for curriculum development, comparing JASON with other vendors, and talking to references before bringing a proposal to the ReMA board in summer 2011.

Life-Cycle Lessons
For those of us who’ve been out of school for a couple of decades, the curriculum is eye-opening. These are not rote lessons that list facts about the industry for students to memorize and recite back. It’s not a textbook. The lessons “are integrating math concepts and science concepts into the subject matter,” Wiener says—in this case, recycling.

Developing the curriculum was a long, detailed process “to make sure the information provided was accurate as well as educational and entertaining,” Knippel says. “A lot of great ReMA members volunteered their time” to make that happen, he adds. The curriculum consists of three sets of lesson plans, for grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. They cover the range of scrap commodities and their life cycles. A table on the two websites lists each unit, which national standard or standards it meets, and what commodities it features. The lessons also meet state standards.

One K-4 lesson, “A to Z,” asks the question, When you throw something “away,” where does it go? The answer starts with the classroom trash can and ends with a discussion of landfills and the great Pacific garbage patch. One hands-on activity has students sort and measure a sample of waste and recyclables from school trash cans. (The plan calls for safety gear such as latex gloves.) After they conduct the experiment, the students brainstorm how they might reuse items they found in the trash or reduce their use of non­recyclable items. The plan also suggests students interview the school custodian about what the school can and cannot recycle.
 
A grade 5-8 lesson—“Can It!”— addresses nonferrous metals, their life-cycle costs, and commodity values. Students use magnets to sort cans into ferrous and nonferrous metals. Then they research the price of scrap aluminum, the aluminum life cycle, and the approximate costs of mining, refining, and transporting primary aluminum. Finally, they argue the pros and cons of four strategies to increase aluminum can recycling.

“Tires Shouldn’t Retire,” a grade 9-12 lesson, pairs an examination of the physical properties of natural rubber—in a rubber band and a latex rubber ball the students create in class—with a discussion of the environmental impacts of natural rubber farming, the construction of a car tire, and uses for scrap tire rubber.

According to the standards, these three lessons are teaching students, among other things, how to understand science and technology, how to analyze and interpret data, the structure and properties of matter, and links among engineering, technology, science, and society.

Beyond the Lesson Plans
The curriculum is just one tangible outcome of the partnership. ReMA and JASON representatives redesigned the “Recycling Is Much Bigger Than Just the Bin” brochure to convey the energy, environmental, and economic benefits of recycling. They created two entirely new Scrap Maps: One shows the life cycles and recycling processes of paper, ferrous metal, and nonferrous metal; the other does the same for plastics, electronics, and tires. Additional reading materials for students address commodities such as precious metals and glass.

JASON also profiled a half-dozen scrap recycling professionals as STEM role models, although here they’re called “champions of recycling.” Mike Biddle, one such champion, explains how he developed a series of techniques for separating and refining plastic scrap that became the basis for the company he founded, MBA Polymers (Worksop, England). Another champion, Silvana Jones, talks about growing up in Brazil, earning a degree in business administration at the University of California, Los Angeles, and now working as a logistics director at SA Recycling (Torrance, Calif.). The JASON role models tend to reflect the diversity in today’s schools, and often they’re young, to show students such careers are within reach, Wiener says. Students “can look up to these young adults” as role models.

Recent ReMA conventions have highlighted another facet of this partnership, the annual poster and video contests, which challenge students in grades K-12 to create a two-minute public service announcement video or hand-drawn poster on the year’s theme. Cellphone and automobile recycling were the first two themes; this year’s is “Bigger Than the Bin.” (For full details, go to jason.org/contests.)

“Programs that ask for creative problem-solving—which, to me, is one of the core concepts for anybody to be successful in the world—are very important,” Knippel says. This contest “gives kids the opportunity for creative problem-solving based on our industry.”

The two grand prize winners and a parent or guardian receive a trip to the ReMA convention, where they accept their awards on the general-session stage in front of hundreds of attendees. “It’s been inspirational, personally for me, to interact with the contest participants and winners,” Knippel says. “When you can get together with kids who are so creative, so excited about what they’re doing, it gives you a great deal of hope for the future.” The trip gives the students a reward worthy of the effort they put into the contest, he says, and it gives them greater exposure to the industry. “I receive thank-you notes from them, and inspirational letters, talking about what a great experience it was for them, how much they enjoyed it, and what a difference it made in their lives.”

Teacher Training
Now that the curriculum and supplemental materials are ready for use, the next step is getting them into the classroom. The daylong training program on Staten Island in June was a pilot event spearheaded by Pratt Industries (Conyers, Ga.), which collects paper curbside in three New York boroughs for its Staten Island corrugated box mill. Pratt worked with Borough President James Oddo, the New York City Department of Education, and nonprofit GrowNYC, which develops model recycling programs at New York schools, to bring the recycling curriculum to Staten Island schools.

Speaking to the teachers the morning of the training session, Pratt Recycling Division President Myles Cohen explains that a conversation he had with Oddo in 2014 led the two men to see they had complementary goals. Oddo is working to reduce litter on the island; Pratt would like to encourage more recycling. Their outreach led the education department to approve 10 lessons from the ReMA curriculum for STEM classes in the 2015-2016 school year. “Because of the borough president’s passion for this, and Pratt and ISRI’s support, we could do this,” Cohen says.

Cohen says he envisions Staten Island serving as a model for the rest of New York City by using the curriculum to show how recycling is good for the environment and good for the economy. The Staten Island mill uses all the paper Pratt collects in New York, so with that paper, we “create jobs right here,” he says. He hopes to offer students tours of the mill, which produces at least one product they should recognize right away—pizza boxes.

That morning, each of the teachers tells why he or she chose to attend the day’s training. Some teach science and say they’re looking for new lessons and classroom activities. More than one teacher speaks of the need to educate other teachers about recycling. Several say they lead their school’s “green” team, community action team, or similar initiatives and are looking for ways to improve recycling in the school or in the community. “[I] really want to put it back on students, empower them [so they] know why [to recycle] and what happens when we don’t recycle,” one says. “If we empower them and make them knowledgeable about what goes on, it will really impact them.”

The day’s trainer, Ron Harrison, gives the teachers overviews of JASON Learning and ReMA and the two organizations’ websites. He points out the spot on the ReMA website where you can learn the economic impact of recycling in your state and congressional district. (According to the site, the recycling industry employs more than 7,000 people in the state of New York.) He talks about the structure of the lesson plans, most notably JASON’s “ABC” approach to hands-on learning: activity before content. In other words, do the fun stuff first to capture the students’ interest, then explain and educate.

With that in mind, Harrison starts the teachers on their second experiment: Sort plastic samples by density. The teachers create five different solutions of alcohol and water and stir a small piece of plastic in each to see if they float. Harrison explains where to find samples of various plastic polymers: plastic cutlery, bottles from household products, and so forth.

The Staten Island event was the third pilot training session for the recycling curriculum. The first, for which United Iron & Metal (Baltimore) was a partner, was in spring 2014 at Baltimore’s Lakeland Elementary/Middle School. And in May, Schupan & Sons (Kalamazoo, Mich.), the ReMA Michigan Chapter, and two individuals from ReMA member companies held a similar event for about 15 teachers at the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency (Portage, Mich.), which serves nine school districts in the area.

Attendance at the training wasn’t as high as he would have liked, says Jay Sherwood, Schupan’s manager of community involvement, who organized and attended the Michigan event, but “it was enough to get things rolling.” He was impressed with the teachers’ enthusiasm—“not only how involved they got [working] with each other, but with the JASON principles” and with the materials they received. “We gave them binders with the lesson plans in them, and they saw that their work is already done for them, by and large, so they were enthused by that part of the program.”

Participants came from seven or eight different school districts, and Sherwood reports that at least two of the districts seem quite enthusiastic about implementing the curriculum. One attendee was from Elkhart, Ind.—a little more than an hour from Kalamazoo, and the location of another Schupan facility. She’s both a school administrator and a part-time JASON instructor, Sherwood says, and she’d like to do similar training in her area.

These training programs take time and effort—and money. The curriculum is free and accessible to everyone, but the trainer, the meeting space, the materials, and so forth can range from $5,000 to $10,000. Sherwood’s advice for interested companies and chapters is to “coordinate—and over-coordinate. Communicate with the schools, and make sure they’ve got a commitment [to provide] participants.” He first tried to conduct this training in summer 2014, he explains, but one month before the scheduled training date, “we had only two teachers signed up. So we canceled it for 2014, and we pursued and persevered and pressed on” to convince teachers to take advantage of this free training opportunity. “Finally, we had the support of senior administration, assistant superintendents, and things like that” to make the event a success.

On Staten Island, Rose Kerr, director of education for the office of the borough president and a former school teacher and principal, is enthusiastic about the curriculum and its potential, but she’s also realistic about the amount of work it takes to get it in the classrooms. “Every school is its own community, with its own personality, leadership,” and so forth, she explains. The key, she says, will be getting educators to realize this doesn’t add to their burden—“it’s not just another thing for them to do.” Instead, it helps them because it takes the science standards and makes them part of the curriculum.

Kerr hopes to build on this summer’s training by bringing an ReMA or JASON representative to speak briefly at the monthly meeting of the district’s roughly 70 principals and then follow up with the individual schools, as Pratt’s Cohen has already done at some schools. “We should meet with the parochial schools, too,” she adds. “It takes plenty of retail politicking” to reach each school’s leaders, but once you do, “we’ve found plenty of enthusiasm. It’s a noble case; it’s necessary training” for the students and for the planet, she says.

Other Outreach Approaches
Wiener emphasizes that training programs are not the only way to introduce the recycling curriculum into schools. “The easiest, most effective, most efficient way for us to get into the school systems is for recyclers … to approach the teachers and principals in the schools where their kids are and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got something to offer you,’” Wiener says. She has done that at the primary school her two daughters attend and is waiting to hear whether they’ll use it.

To help you make that initial contact, ReMA and JASON have created a community outreach kit, which is on the ReMA website. The kit provides information about ReMA and JASON; sample letters for members to send to school board representatives, local educators, and local media; and one-page information sheets for educators and the media that help connect people’s everyday recycling experiences with the bigger recycling industry.

It doesn’t cost you anything—other than your time—to give teachers or principals the link to the recycling curriculum and say, “I’m available to sit with a classroom, answer questions, [and] host a facility visit,” Wiener says. JASON’s efforts go a long way toward bringing the curriculum alive for students, but “it means so much more if they get to see [recycling] and ask questions of a real recycler.” You can download the entire curriculum, the two Scrap Maps, and the “Recycling Is Much Bigger Than Just the Bin” brochure from the website for free as well.

ISRI is making available (at its cost) a variety of promotional and educational items, in sets of 25, you can give to students when you visit their classroom or they visit your facility. These include the “Bigger Than the Bin” brochure and Scrap Maps, printed on glossy paper; keychain magnets that say “Recycling Is Bigger Than the Bin”; and highlighter pens that also are Rubik’s Cube–type puzzles that list scrap commodities. ReMA also has a limited supply of kid-sized safety glasses, hard hats, and safety vests it can give to member companies hosting students for a facility tour. (For more information, contact Bob Ensinger, ISRI’s vice president of communications and marketing, at 202/662-8510 or bobensinger@isri.org.)

You can start by making sure the school knows about the video and poster contests, which have an entry deadline of Dec. 18 this year. If every ReMA member who has a child in primary or secondary school e-mails the principal a link to the contest, Wiener says, or gets it announced in the school newsletter, “that will increase dramatically the [number of] entries and the visibility of the industry.”

ISRI and JASON are continuing to promote the recycling curriculum on a national basis. JASON conducts teacher training events around the country in which it promotes the recycling curriculum among its offerings. The two groups exhibited at the National Science Teachers Association (Arlington, Va.) meeting in Chicago in March, giving away more than 50 copies of the curriculum and 500 Scrap Maps to interested teachers and administrators. They will exhibit at NSTA’s 2016 conference in Nashville, Tenn., where they hope to organize a scrap­yard visit for the educators. They also exhibited at a conference of the Science Teachers Association of Texas (Austin, Texas), which is reportedly the largest state-run conference of its kind in a state that, due to its size and population, has a significant influence on school curricula. And Wiener was a keynote speaker at JASON’s 2014 National Educators Conference, which also had a 90-minute breakout session on the recycling curriculum.

JASON reports that 4,600 students and teachers accessed the recycling curriculum online in 2014, although that’s only a rough indication of the curriculum’s reach and use. JASON continues to optimize the curriculum’s pages to appear in search engines and to promote the curriculum through social media and other outlets, says Sean Smith, JASON’s chief operating officer and chief information officer.

Smith notes one upcoming change that’s likely to increase the reach of the recycling curriculum substantially. Most of the JASON curricula are behind a paywall. JASON offers subscription packages that range from a single classroom to a school, district, or an entire state. Initially, the ReMA curriculum was outside the paywall to ensure it was available free to educators whether or not they have a subscription. Soon JASON will have the curriculum both inside and outside the paywall.

Why is that going to extend its reach? Smith explains that subscribers can search across all the curricula behind the paywall for lessons that meet their specific needs. So if you’re a science teacher looking for a lesson for seventh graders that meets the national standard for “the structure and properties of matter,” for example, the ReMA lesson on the properties of tire rubber will show up right alongside lessons from JASON’s weather, energy, and geology curricula.

In Your Hands
ISRI renewed its contract with JASON in 2014 so it can update the curriculum to meet continually changing federal and state standards, create new lesson plans as needed, continue the video and poster contests, and produce additional student materials and interactive activities to support the teacher guides. As teachers and schools start using the curriculum, their feedback will tell us what’s working and what’s not.

“One of the things I want to do is [develop] an online commodities game because it’s going to teach economics and math and also raise awareness about the commodity-like nature of our material,” Wiener says. She was appointed to the JASON board this year, where she’ll serve alongside a former member of Congress and representatives from the American Association of School Administrators (Alexandria, Va.), the New York State Council of School Superintendents (Albany, N.Y.), and The Explorers Club (New York).

Even before we hear back from teachers and schools using the recycling curriculum, the fact that ReMA has developed it shows that the scrap recycling industry is “contributing to our communities, to education, and to the future,” Wiener says—and it’s creating a buzz. One U.S. senator wants to get the curriculum into all of his state’s schools, she notes. Other U.S. recycling organizations want to partner with ReMA to promote it, and those in other countries and regions want to emulate it. “The investment has paid off in so many different ways for ISRI,” both tangible and intangible, she says. “I’m just incredibly excited about it.”

The recycling curriculum is a worthwhile, even essential, investment, especially with the industry facing such difficult times, Knippel says. “We have a lot at risk here, in the future, and if we don’t continue to address it as an industry—and that pertains to safety, that pertains to legislation, and that pertains to all aspects of our business on a daily basis—there will be no future.”

Kramer agrees. “We can never be so shortsighted as not to invest in our future,” he says, and that means investing in children. “That’s what most of us get up and go to work for every day—our families, our kids. There is no greater investment we can make [to ensure] the long-term survivability of our industry.”  

Rachel H. Pollack is editor-in-chief of Scrap.

Reading, Writing, and Recycling
Want to introduce your local schools to the scrap recycling curriculum ReMA and JASON Learning have created? Here’s how:

--Contact teachers and administrators to let them know this free, standards-based curriculum is available. Go to www.isri.org/jason and click on “Community Outreach Kit” for sample letters and fact sheets. (You will need to log in to access the materials.)
--Promote the ISRI–JASON Learning video and poster contest on bulletin boards, newsletters, and social media outlets. This year’s contest deadline is Dec. 18.
--Download and print the two Scrap Maps and the “Recycling Is Much Bigger Than Just the Bin” brochure, or purchase them and other inexpensive items that promote industry messages from the ReMA Store at www.isri.org.
--Offer to visit a classroom or have students visit your recycling facility. For child-sized hard hats, vests, and safety glasses, contact ISRI’s Bob Ensinger at 202/662-8510 or bobensinger@isri.org.
--Organize a teacher training day with JASON Learning. Contact Ensinger for more details.