There are two versions of each lab, one with a ten-question conclusion and one with directions for a full lab report. This way the teacher has the option! Each lab is two pages to allow for one two-sided handout.
A 5-Star Customer Review of Chemistry on a Budget at amazon.com states:
“[S]traight forward, to the point, using household chemicals… this is the lab book for you.
I teach high school chemistry and this is exactly what I was looking for. Labs included simple household chemicals that could be easily found. Nice format, easy to follow along procedures, and touches on every topic of our chemistry curriculum.”
You can buy this lab book for $23 at amazon.com or lulu.com. It will take 1-2 weeks to get to you -- Order Now. It’s a great resource!
http://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Budget-Marjorie-R-Heesemann/dp/0578129159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389410170&sr=1-1&keywords=chemistry+on+a+budget
http://www.lulu.com/shop/marjorie-r-heesemann/chemistry-on-a-budget/paperback/product-21217600.html
*Some of you have already purchased my lab book – be sure to check out Page 141 !
“Americans love convenient recycling, but convenient recycling increasingly does not love us. Waste experts call the system of dumping all the recyclables into one bin ‘single-stream recycling.’ It’s popular. But the cost-benefit math of it has changed. The benefit — more participation and thus more material put forward for recycling — may have been overtaken by the cost — unrecyclable recyclables.”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/#done
“When you throw stuff away, you might be very glad to get rid of it: into the trash it goes, never to be seen again! Unfortunately, that's not the end of the story. The things we throw away have to go somewhere—usually they go off to be bulldozed underground in a landfill or burnt in an incinerator. Landfills can be horribly polluting. They look awful, they stink, they take up space that could be used for better things, and they sometimes create toxic soil and water pollution that can kill fish in our rivers and seas.
One of the worst things about landfills is that they're wasting a huge amount of potentially useful material. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of resources to make things and when we throw those things in a landfill, at the end of their lives, we're also saying goodbye to all the energy and resources they contain. Some authorities like to burn their trash in giant incinerators instead of burying it in landfills. That certainly has advantages: it reduces the amount of waste that has to be buried and it can generate useful energy. But it can also produce toxic air pollution and burning almost anything (except plants that have grown very recently) adds to the problem of global warming and climate change.
The trouble is, we're all in the habit of throwing stuff away. In the early part of the 20th century, people used materials much more wisely—especially in World War II (1939–1945), when many raw materials were in short supply. But in recent decades we've become a very disposable society. We tend to buy new things instead of getting old ones repaired. A lot of men use disposable razors, for example, instead of buying reusable ones, while a lot of women wear disposable nylon stockings. Partly this is to do with the sheer convenience of throwaway items. It's also because they're cheap: artificial plastics, made from petroleum-based materials, became extremely inexpensive and widely available after the end of World War II. But that wasteful period in our history is coming to an end.
We're finally starting to realize that our live-now, pay-later lifestyle is storing up problems for future generations. Earth is soon going to be running on empty if we carry on as we are. Americans live in much greater affluence than virtually anyone else on Earth. What happens when people in developing countries such as India and China decide they want to live the same way as us? According to the environmentalists Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins, we'd need two Earths to satisfy all their needs. If everyone on Earth doubles their standard of living in the next 40 years, we'll need 12 Earths to satisfy them! ”
https://www.explainthatstuff.com/recycling.html
“The world recycles just 14% of the plastic packaging it uses. Even worse: 8m tons of plastic, much of it packaging, ends up in the oceans each year, where sea life and birds die from eating it or getting entangled in it. Some of the plastics will also bind with industrial chemicals that have polluted oceans for decades, raising concerns that toxins can make their way into our food chain.
Recycling the remaining 86% of used plastics could create $80bn-$120bn in revenues, says a recent report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. But those revenues will never be fully achieved without designing new ways to breakdown and reuse 30% (by weight) of the plastic packaging that isn’t recycled because the material is contaminated or too small for easy collection, has very low economic value or contains multiple materials that cannot be easily separated. Think of candy wrappers, take-out containers, single-serving coffee capsules and foil-lined boxes for soup and soymilk.
Large companies have developed plant-based alternatives to conventional, petroleum-based plastic so that they can break down without contaminating the soil and water. The market opportunity has attracted small, young companies that focus on developing recycling technology to tackle that troublesome 30% of plastic packaging that is headed to landfills at best, and, at worst, to our rivers, lakes and oceans.”
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/feb/22/plastics-recycling-trash-chemicals-styrofoam-packaging#done
You may want to your students to read the entire article “The Era of Easy Recycling may be Coming to an End” https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/#done
Students may read it as a Homework assignment or for Extra Credit. One assignment may be to list 10 facts from the article, with Extra Credit for a Unique Fact that no other student has listed
One article listed in this Blog about Recycling was:
09/10/2015 Recycling
You may have Midterm Examinations coming up, so for your reference:
01/04/2015 Midterm Examinations
*This Blog contains several entries that would be helpful to your chemistry classroom. Check out the Topic List to help you to find past Blog entries.
Also, Write To Me about your successes, challenges, or questions in the Chemistry Classroom.
Remember, buying a copy of the lab book Chemistry on a Budget can be very useful to your Chemistry classroom with labs and class article ideas.
Enjoy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and your 3-day weekend!