by Carley Bruner
This year Mr. Cushman’s ecology class has done a lot of new and educational things. They have done a couple of projects such as dissecting owl vomit, recycling every Monday, and on days when it’s nice they go outside and do some landscaping around the school and help make our school look better. The most current project they have done is building their own landfills.
This project had a couple of very specific purposes. “A hands-on project, to help you remember and visualize how it’s supposed to be, how it looks, how it’s actually physically built, just a model/replica of a landfill,” said Mr. Cushman. Most of the students learned something from doing this project. “There are many layers to a landfill, and there are a lot of different equipment that you need to put with it”, said senior Danielle Seabolt.
A landfill is a low area of land that is built up from deposits of solid refuse in layers covered by soil. There are many important layers to a landfill, such as a lechate pond, soil layer, drainage layer, gravel, lechate collection pipe, plastic liner, and compacted clay. They all combine together to make sure that nothing toxic or anything that would harm the environment will leak out. The students got to use whatever material Mr. Cushman had in the classroom to build their own model of a landfill. The items they chose each had a different part in their model and they had to explain what they used each item for.
The students (and Mr. Cushman as well) had a little bit of difficulty on some of this project. Mr. Cushman says the hardest part was “getting the students to do it.” Some of the students had troubles with different areas of the project. “Doing the research on what goes into the landfill (was difficult),” stated junior Shelby Strang. “The hardest part for us was getting all of our materials together and trying to figure out what we are going to do with it,” commented Danielle.
