Surface Area of Plastic Items

Disintegration of Plastic Items

Personal Plastic Consumption

In this lesson, students will consider how many single-use plastics they use in a week. Students will then use ratio tables and graphs to investigate what happens when they scale up to a month, six months, and a year. 

School-Wide Plastic Consumption

In this lesson, students will use ratio tables and graphs to estimate how much plastic is used by all the students in their class, all the students in their grade, and all the students in their school. Students will then determine how many plastic items each student can use in order to meet a school-wide goal of reducing plastic consumption. 

Great Pacific Garbage Patch and Trash Wheels

In this lesson, students will explore the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and learn how trash wheels help reduce the amount of plastic that pollutes our waterways. Students will then model a sampling method used to measure the amount of plastic collected by trash wheels. 

The Problem With Plastics

In this unit, students use plastic as a context to explore mathematical and environmental concepts. The unit starts with an investigation of the surface area of a right cylinder, using a Geogebra applet to visualize and calculate the surface area of familiar plastic items.

Following this, students learn about the breakdown of plastics in the environment and their persistence in waterways. They apply ratio tables and graphs to analyze their own plastic consumption across different time frames, scaling up from a week to a year.

Students further explore plastic use on a larger scale, considering their class, grade, and school, and determine individual actions to collectively reduce plastic consumption.

To conclude, students investigate the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and model methods such as sampling and trash wheels used to measure and mitigate plastic pollution in waterways.