Educational Initiatives
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WMRC provides information on topics including household hazardous waste, pollution prevention in schools and sustainable development for communities. The Center's chemists assist in programs at area schools, discussing chemistry and science with grade school children. For many years WMRC has provided lab demonstration tours and lectures for Parkland College chemistry students, adding real-world meaning to their coursework.
This year, WMRC and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency co-sponsored five workshops on Safe Chemical Usage in Schools. The workshops addressed the chemicals in the classroom that put students and teachers at risk, safe handling and disposal of those chemicals, and what hazardous educational materials are found in classrooms. The workshops also introduced the principles of “green chemistry” to middle school and high school teachers, while providing suggestions for using these principles in the classroom. "Green chemistry" involves the reduction or elimination of the use or generation of hazardous materials in chemical processes, resulting in safer, more environmentally friendly science. More than 200 teachers and administrators representing 175 schools attended the workshops.
WMRC and IEPA are currently developing a free technical assistance program to improve physical environmental conditions at Illinois schools, while also providing teachers with state standards-based tools to introduce the concepts of waste reduction and pollution prevention to students.
As the host agency for the Great Lakes Regional Pollution Prevention Roundtable (GLRPPR), WMRC has continued to provide information on pollution prevention for educational institutions throughout the Great Lakes regions of the U.S. and Canada. Information on mercury in schools, green school building design, air quality and energy efficiency for schools is provided on the GLRPPR web site. A session on pollution prevention in schools was also featured at the GLRPPR Winter 2003 conference held in March in Chicago.
WMRC also presented workshops to DuPage County middle and high school teachers. Dr. Bill Nelson from WMRC presented a workshop that provided teachers with instruction material and hands on training of non-hazardous chemistry experiments for the classroom, explained the hazards of chemicals commonly used in schools, and detailed resources on how to safely dispose of them. Dr. Gary Miller from WMRC presented a program that explained the hazards of common cleaning agents and described safer, more "environmentally friendly" alternatives to these agents. WMRC also worked with the Illinois State Water Survey to present DuPage County Groundwater model-building sessions with teachers. The 15 teachers who received the training then became groundwater mentors for other teachers.
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