• Several weeks

• Shovel
• Backyard or other space where you can dig and bury items
• Soil
• Craft sticks
• Permanent marker
• Different products and materials to test:
  • Glass (juice bottle, baby food jar, etc.)
  • Paper (non-wax coated paper items: newspaper, cardboard, construction paper, etc. and/or wax-coated paper items: cups, plates, etc.)
  • Plastic (shopping bag, sandwich bag, plastic cutlery, etc.)
  • Foam (styrofoam cup, plastic foam from a plate or meat tray, etc.)
  • Wood (wood scraps, craft stick, wooden skewers, etc.)
  • Fabric (piece of cotton fabric, wool felt, etc.)
  • Organic (lettuce leaf, apple core, etc.)
  • Any other consumer product!
• A notebook (this will be your lab book)

1. Decide which types of materials to test. Choose a variety of different kinds of products. Select at least 5 samples.
2. Label one popsicle stick per item with the permanent marker. Make sure you can read your labels!
3. With adult permission, find a spot that is out of the way of traffic to bury your items. Get help to dig a hole there. Make sure the hole is big enough so that your items are not overlapping. You do not need to dig deeper than 1 foot.
4. Bury each item and place your labeled craft sticks in the appropriate spots.
5. Leave the items buried for at least 3 weeks. For better results, wait 6 weeks or more. You can use a calendar to mark when to dig up your items.
6. While you are waiting, think of a way to measure how much each item has decomposed and make a note of it in your lab book. Also, think of how this can relate to how biodegradable an item is. Biodegradable means that it breaks down and becomes part of the Earth without harming it. If it decomposes easily is an item more or less biodegradable? Here is one example of a scale used to measure degradation:
   
   

   1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
   No degradation, the item is intact	The item is soft but still whole	Intact, with a few holes	Intact, with more holes	Mostly intact, with lots of holes	About 1/2 the item is gone	Almost all holes	Falling apart with large tears	Almost nothing left	The item is all gone

   
   
7. Make some predictions! Which item do you think will be most broken down? Which item will not have changed at all? Record these predictions, or hypotheses, in your lab book.
8. When it is time to dig up the items, use your shovel to gently uncover each item. Record your observations in your lab book and make sure to rate the item using your scale. Ask an adult how to dispose of any remains accordingly.
9. What did you learn? Which items degraded the most? The least? How do your results match up with your predictions? Which materials do you think will break down best in a landfill? Which materials do you think are more biodegradable?  

• Repeat the activity using the same kinds of items from different brands. For instance, do paper cups from 5 different brands decompose the same way?
• Consider the environmental conditions where your buried your items. Try the experiment again, this time bury your items in two or more different sites. Leave one site alone (that will be your "control") and change the environment at the other sites. You could choose anything from watering the site every day, stomping on top of the area daily or laying your items on top of each other. Does changing the environmental conditions affect the degradation rate of your materials? What conditions do you think best reflect the conditions of a landfill? Of a compost pile?

Every day we throw away bags of household trash. Where does it all go? Some household waste can be recycled. Glass, paper and plastic can be sorted at recycling facilities and made into new products. Everything else goes to a landfill and Canada has over 10,000 landfill sites. A landfill is a carefully designed structure built on top of or in the ground, where trash can be kept separate from the rest of the environment. A protective barrier, made commonly of clay or plastic, is used to minimize the amount of harmful chemicals leaching into the ground.

Most of the decomposition (break down of matter) occuring in landfills is anaerobic, which means it is performed in the absence of oxygen. This is because waste becomes buried underneath more waste, with little access to any air. Microorganisms, like bacteria, break down whatever biodegradable materials there are in the landfill. However, decomposition is slow because of the presence of non-biodegradable materials and because of the conditions of the landfill. 

A compost pile, however, is made up of all biodegradable and organic waste. In composting, microorganisms break down the organic parts of the biodegradable waste.This process is usually aerobic, meaning it requires oxygen. Oxygen is delivered to the compost pile by turning and aerating it. The compost pile must also be kept moist for the microorganisms to live and multiply. Bacteria and fungi break down the organic material. They are eaten, in turn, by single-celled organisms (protozoa), small worms (nematodes) and mites. Larger predatory mites, nematodes and invertebrates (beetles, millipedes, etc.) eat the smaller protozoa, nematodes and mites. The population of microorganisms is kept balanced by this food chain. Once the waste in a compost pile is done decomposing, it can be used as a fertilizer or soil because it is full of nutrients.