4.+Method


 * Experimental Procedure**

**1.** Get your whole family involved! For the first week, place two garbage bags in the kitchen. Use the permanent marker to label one bag "food items" and the ;other one "dry garbage." Your family will put all their garbage into these bags for the first week of the experiment.


 * 2.** Give each member of your family two gallon-sized (3.8 l) self-sealing plastic bags: one is for food, the other is for dry garbage, It's very important that your family members place ALL the garbage they would normally throw away outside the home (at work, school, etc.) in the bags. (This includes leftover lunch and soda bottles, but doesn't include tissues and toilet paper.) When you get home, collect their garbage and put it in the bigger bags. Wash out the smaller bags every night for them, and have them reuse the bags the next day. (Hey, it's the least you can do.)


 * 3.** After the week of garbage collecting, weigh yourself and record your weight. Then weigh yourself holding the dry garbage bag. Subtract the weight from this number. And that's how many kilograms of dry garbage your family produced. Do the same thing for the food garbage bag. Add the weight of the two garbage bags together to find the total amount of garbage your family produces in one week.


 * 4.** Put on the latex gloves and go through the garbage with your family. Can you recycle or compose most of your garbage? Devise a plan and implement it. (See the Take Action section for ideas.)


 * 5.** Continue to collect your family's garbage and weigh it at the end of every week for three weeks.


 * Conclusion

How much did your total garbage decrease? Make a line graph of time in weeks versus total amount of trash. Which type of garbage decreased the most - dry garbage or food garbage? **Which was easier to reduce? How much garbage did you keep out of the landfill during your experiment?


 * Take a Closer Look

You probably only think about the trash when you have to take it to the curb on trash pick-up day. A big truck comes to haul it away and you forget all about it. Where exactly does all that garbage goes? Most of it is buried in landfills. Some gets recycled or recovered and some is burnt. There are two ways to bury trash. A dump is an open hole in which trash is dumped and buried. A landfill is built into or on top of the ground. It's carefully designed so that trash is isolated from the surrounding environment (groundwater, air, rain) with a bottom liner and daily covering of soil. Many modern landfills also have leachate and methane collection systems. Leach ate is water that has percolated through the landfill and contains contaminated substances, Methane, a greenhouse gas, is produced as the trash decomposes, (Often the methane is pumped to a power plant where it can be burned as fuel.)

While landfills protect the environment from pollution, the trash does not decompose much. A landfill is designed just to bury trash so there is little of the water or oxygen that bacteria need to decompose the garbage. Once a landfill closes, the site must be maintained for up to 30 years. **