This month's newsletter topic is Materials, Minerals, Metals, and Materials Engineering. This month's activity for 9th and 10th grade students provides the opportunity for students to explore a portion of materials engineering they encounter everyday: packaging engineering. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that one-third of America's municipal solid waste comes from packaging. Given that, it is possible to make a significant impact on the environment by adopting packaging that is highly functional yet minimally wasteful. Some elements of this strategy, which is known as source reduction, include: lighter packaging, larger-sized packaging, flexible vs. rigid packing, and eliminating or reducing water. Packaging engineers are faced with this challenge as more products are being developed. It is their job to engineer packaging that will function as needed, but also have minimal environmental damage.

In this month's activity, Making Decisions: Packaging and the Environment, students redesign and justify the packaging currently used in some consumer products. The students are presented with the following scenario. A new President has been elected on a platform stressing environmental awareness. The new President proposes that in addition to increasing our targets for recycling and reusing materials, the U.S. will reduce the amount of packaging being used by 25% within 4 years. The Committee for Protection of the Environment is designing alternative packaging that meets these new guidelines to ensure that the 25% reduction target is met. As a member of this committee, groups of four students work with a particular product to design a way to meet this package reduction.

This activity comes to you from the TeachEngineering Digital Library, a part of the new Engineering Pathway and the National Science Digital Library. The Engineering Pathway portal provides high-quality teaching and learning resources in applied science and math, engineering, computer science/information technology and engineering technology — for use by K-12 and university educators. The Engineering Pathway brings together quality engineering education materials from all over the internet, including those from the TeachEngineering Digital Library, allowing teachers to search all of these documents in a single location.