I like to watch the TV show
Flea Market Flip, so since today's theme was Waste Management, I had the teachers upcycle an old object. "Upcycle" is a little different than "recycle," because theoretically you are making something old into something useful. That's probably where we got the phrase "trash to treasure." I gave each partner pair a used object (I found a lot of stuff at our bulky trash pickup last month). This group made a laundry basket out of a scrap of orange construction fencing.
I thought this was pretty clever - they made a vase out of my broken TV remote control. They took the numbers out and stuck the flower through one of the button holes.
Right before lunch, we toured the Freight Farm hydroponic lab. This is an old refrigerated freight car that someone has turned into a miniature greenhouse. They don't use dirt. They grow the plants in stuff that kind of looks like black cotton balls and then spray water and liquid plant food directly on the roots.
These trays held 10,000 basil plant seedlings. They were interviewing a young college student the same time we were there. If he got the job, he was going to be transplanting all those seedlings one at a time into long vertical growing tubes. Not a job I would want to take on.
In the afternoon we toured a couple LEED-certified buildings in the neighborhood. LEED Platinum is the highest green energy rating you can get. This particular building was Alberici Construction. Their building is surrounded by a big pond that catches all the rainwater so it doesn't go into the storm sewers. It had some pretty walking paths that employees could use at lunch, though no one was out there when we visited, because it was in the 90's outside. Alberici also gets 20% of their energy from a giant wind mill on the property. It sits right next to the I-170, so I always see it when I drive down the freeway. Since you don't see many windmills in the city, it was nice to find out who it belonged to.
