A Century of Plastics                      
Student Worksheet: 
Plastic Hunt! 

Step One: As a team think about items you can find in your home, classroom, or on the playground.  Can you identify any items that have no component parts made of plastic?  

Kitchen Items	Bathroom Items	Classroom Items	  Sports Equipment	

				

Questions:

1. Was it harder than you thought to find products that contained no plastic? 

2. Of the products you found with no plastic, what did they have in common? 

3. If you were reengineering one of the products you found, would you change
 any of the component parts to plastic? Why? Why not?                                                              

4. Do you think CDs would be possible without plastics?  Why? Why not?    

5. Why is recycling important?

A Century of Plastics                       
Student Worksheet: 
You Be the Engineer

Step One: As a team, come up with a list of four machines or products that you think would be impossible without the invention of plastics.  For each, answer the questions below:

	What % of product is plastic?	Why would this be impossible without plastic?	How has this machine or product impacted the world?	
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Step Two: Your challenge is to work as a team of "engineers" to replace some of the plastic in any of the four products or machines you identified in the first part of this worksheet to make them easier to recycle.  Discuss what materials you will use instead, how it will impact performance, price, or aesthetics.  Then present your ideas to the class in three forms:  
·	describe what your product does, and the percentage of it you think is plastic. 
·	explain which components you will replace with other materials; describe how you selected the replacement materials and how the new materials will impact weight, cost, and functionality of the product.
·	predict whether this product will be as effective as the current design, whether it might cost more to manufacture, and how it would be easier to recycle.
·	describe how your team believes that the engineering of plastics into common products has impacted the world.