Pound students awarded for pollution solutions

Nebraska may not be near an ocean, but that doesn’t mean people in the heartland can’t affect the seas.  With some hard work and even more creativity, the 7th grade students at Pound Middle School developed their own solutions for reducing plastic pollution in waterways.  These solutions sprung from National Geographic’s annual GeoChallenge, a program that tasks middle school students with generating real solutions to real-world problems.  This year’s challenge was focused on “Tackling Plastic!” and asked students to investigate the pressing issue of plastic litter polluting our waterways.

Leading the students were Pound science teachers Anica Brown and Kirsten Smith. Under their guidance, 11 of the 45 total projects qualified for the regional competition in Kansas.  There, two Pound teams were awarded 2nd and 3rd place overall for their project proposals. These awards included a monetary prize, which students plan to use for a sustainability project at Pound in the fall.  

This past week, a showcase was held to display all of the students’ impressive projects.  Students focused on waterways as near as Holmes Lake and as far away as the Ganges River in India.  One project – the second place regional winner – centered on cleaning up the North Platte River. Students laid the framework for a non-profit that organizes communities in removing plastic litter from the river, as well as introduces waxworms to the environment, a type of critter that eats plastic.  Another project proposed a filtering system for cleansing toxic waste in waterways while at the same time generating clean energy through the process. Other projects focused on tactics to incentivize the use of reusable and non-plastic products.

Given the success of student involvement this year and the value of the hands-on learning experience, Brown and Smith hope to expand LPS’s involvement in the program in coming years.