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Teaching Leave No Trace

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Pack it In, Pack it Out: A Leave No Trace activity exploring trash disposal

What Your Group Will Learn: After participating in an activity designed to study trash disposal in the outdoors, group members will be capable of:

1. describing Leave No Trace methods of trash disposal.
2. identifying degradable and nondegradable trash.
3. describing the social impacts of litter and methods of reducing trash in city landfills.

Participants will imagine they are cleaning up a previously used campsite. After scouring the campsite for trash, they will evaluate the effects of trash on animals, the effectiveness of burning trash, and differences between degradable and nondegradable trash.

Materials

• Bag of trash: empty pop can, foam cup, aluminum foil, gum wrappers, plastic six-pack holder, graham cracker box, twist tops, others.
• Blind folds.
• Smelly foods: B-B-Q sauce, onions, others.
• Odorless foods: carrots, celery, others
• Samples of partially burned trash: melted bottle, soda can, plastic six-pack holder, foil. You will have to plan ahead and search old fire sites to find burned items.

Preparation:

• Read the entire activity plan and Back ground Information thoroughly. This activity should take approximately 30-45 minutes to complete.
• Go through and select garbage from your home and prepare it for use as examples. Wash out soda cans,etc.
• Before the group arrives, hide trash in obscure places. Trash should be visible but not blatantly so.

Grabbing Your Group's Attention - 10 minutes

Set the stage for the activity when all of the participants arrive. Ask them to visualize that they have hiked 10 miles into the back try and have just arrived at their first night's camp site. Your group will be at this campsite for two nights. Previous campers have left the site full of trash. Send the group on a trash hunt to clean up the site. Give the group 5-10 minutes to locate as much trash as they can.

Ask the group, What should we do with all this trash? Possible answers may be: burn it, bury it, and pack it out. Have the participants vote on which option they think would be the best. They should be able to give reasons for their choices.

Steps for Teaching This Activity - 30 Minutes

How Smart is Your Smeller?

Ask group members how they found the trash. What senses did they list? (Most likely, participants depended upon their eyesight.) Ask the group how animals find food. Explain that animals have a much keener sense of smell, and often better sight, than humans. This keen sense of smell attracts them to food and garbage left behind in the backcountry. To simulate this experience, tell the par pants they are going to take the smell test.

Have participants close their eyes. Hold the various food objects one at a time under each participant's nose. Have them identify each food item. Repeat until all participants have had a chance to test each food item.

Time Out for Discussion: A close review of the Background Information is needed to effectively lead discussion.

• Lead a discussion about animals' use of smell to find food. Use the analogy of a dog burying a bone and using smell to find it later. The same occurs when animals find food that was buried near campsites. The smell of food is also what attracts bears to campsites.
• Discuss the dangers of having animals in campsites. Also discuss dangers to animals dependent upon human food, including problems with digesting human food and packaging. Remember that these animals are wild and a potential danger to human life. Animals that have become dependent on human food often raid campsites or populated areas in search of food and must often be destroyed. These are just a few of the reasons it is important to leave a clean campsite.

Campfire Trash: Have participants divide their trash into burnable and nonburnable items.

Time Out for Discussion: Review Background Information.

What happens to these items when you put them into the fire? Does everything turn to ash?

• Show examples of items that do not burn to ash, i.e., foil lining, cans and glass. Bring out the partially burned items you collected for your activity and explain that not everything burns. Some items require a very hot fire and take a long time to burn. These remain as litter in the campsite.
  
• Burning trash puts odors into the air that can attract animals and flies to the site.
• Many places may have fire restrictions that do not allow open fires. Campers cannot always depend on burning as a trash disposal option.

Is That Trash Temporary?

1. Have the participants divide the trash into de able and nondegradable piles. Define "degradable" if necessary.
2. Have the participants explain why they divided the trash the way they did. Have them readjust their stacks of trash if necessary.

Time Out for Discussion: Review Background Information.

How long does trash last in the outdoors? Ask group members to guess how long different kinds of trash last in the outdoors. For example, it takes about 200-400 years for an aluminum can to degrade. A cigarette butt takes 2-5 years, and a banana peel may take 3-5 weeks. Refer to Back ground Information for details.

Wrapping Up the Activity - 10 Minutes

• Proper trash disposal is an important responsibility for everyone and in every place that we live or visit. How well has the group learned to properly dispose of trash?
• Discuss what choices could have been made at home when packing to eliminate bringing some of the nondegradable items.
• What choices can you make in your every day life to eliminate the amount of trash in your city s landfill? Explain that nondegradable items are a good choice when they can be reused many times.
• Have the group make a list of things they are already doing, and pledge to start doing, to make a difference for the environment.

Congratulations on conducting a well-prepared meeting for your group! It's fun, rewarding, and one of the most important things you'll do as a leader.