One of the most important aspects of recycling is global awareness, according to Donna E. Meier, who developed a recycling project for middle schools for the NCSU Project Ideas website. For this project, students spend one to two weeks gathering information about how their community deals with trash and recycling. The students learn as much as possible; for example, the students may collect information on the percentage of waste recycled, the way recycling happens within the neighborhood and the type of waste least often recycled. For the last week or two of the project, the students compare their findings with each other, and then communicate these findings with another school in a different part of the country or world.
In the University of Wyoming's Spring 2010 campus sustainability class, one student created a project that recycled the furniture from exiting seniors by donating it to incoming freshman, as reported by the College of Business. While this specific project does not fit the lifestyles of eighth graders, it highlights the necessity to look at your school's specifics to determine the best way to recycle. When creating a science-based recycling project for your students, find solutions to problems that plague your specific community. For example, if many of the students participate in the arts, then create a science project that converts paper into a sculptable material. If students participate in music, look at which recyclable materials can be turned into music room soundproofing.
Enlist your eighth-grade science students to create a campus-wide recycling project. For this project, the students start a campaign to encourage recycling. But, to keep the project scientific, create an experiment out of it. First, measure the amount of recycling per week for two to three weeks before the beginning of the project. At the end of each week after the recycling campaign begins, weigh out the school's recycling. Measure the changes over the next few weeks, and at the end of the project, instruct the kids to determine the amount of energy saved, waste diverted from landfills and other environmental effects that their project will have per year, if continued.
Outside of earth science and chemistry, you can look at how biological mechanisms affect the way people recycle. Create experiments for your students (or instruct them to develop their own) that look at the psychological reaction to different recycling efforts. For example, are people more willing to recycle when recycling posters show famous people (or school celebrities)? This kind of project introduces the class to behavioral sciences, which become part of the potential curriculum for high school students.