Students investigate how solid waste disposal and sewage treatment choices in campus, shipboard, and port settings affect water quality, air quality, ecosystems, and human health, then use evidence to decide which harmful practice should be replaced first. Through waste audits, regulatory analysis, and comparison of landfill, incineration, recycling, composting, and treatment options, they design and refine realistic recommendations that address environmental impact, safety, cost, and feasibility. The experience builds AP Environmental Science content knowledge alongside critical thinking, collaboration, and public communication as teams prepare for a community-facing showcase. Ultimately, students connect local pollution systems to broader environmental decisions and identify practical changes that can reduce waste and pollution now and in the future.

Students will compare landfill, incineration, recycling, composting, and sewage treatment methods and explain how each affects water quality, air quality, biodiversity, and human health in campus, port, and shipboard contexts. Students will analyze waste-audit data, maritime regulations, and pollution case evidence to identify which disposal practices create the greatest impacts and to justify realistic alternatives using benefits, drawbacks, and tradeoffs. Students will design, evaluate, and refine a recommendation for reducing pollution and waste-related health risks, then communicate their claim through evidence boards, concept maps, demonstrations, and a public presentation. Students will strengthen collaboration, critique, and reflection skills by revising their work after peer, teacher, maritime crew, and port partner feedback.

Students create a running evidence portfolio that includes a campus waste-audit data table, shipboard and port notes, impact maps, and a before-and-after concept map showing how their understanding of disposal methods, sewage treatment, and health risks changes over time. In teams, they build a gallery walk display or expo station with annotated data boards, disposal-method rankings, cause-and-effect models, and a waste-stream sorting or treatment demonstration. Each team also produces a 90-second pitch and a final public recommendation identifying which waste disposal method should be replaced first, supported by evidence, benefits, drawbacks, and realistic alternatives for the campus-port-maritime context. As a transfer task, students complete a short team analysis of a new waste scenario and defend the best disposal or treatment response using scientific evidence and tradeoffs.

Open with a Trash to Treasure Kickoff in which teams rotate through stations of real or simulated campus, shipboard, and port waste samples, sort each item by likely disposal method, and post first-notice claims about environmental and human health risks on a shared evidence wall. Follow with a Port to Planet Preview gallery walk using short case cards, impact maps, and photos of landfill, incineration, recycling, composting, and sewage treatment practices so students can identify which methods seem most harmful and why. End the launch with the essential question and a quick team pitch: which waste system should a community or port change first to reduce pollution and health risks?

Host a Harbor Change Summit that combines a gallery-style Blue Impact Showcase with short public presentations. Each team runs an expo station featuring evidence maps, impact charts, a before-and-after concept map, and a waste-stream sorting or sewage-treatment demonstration, then delivers a 90-second pitch defending which disposal method should be replaced first and why. Invite the student body, families, maritime crew, and port agents or port authority to rotate through stations, ask questions, and give feedback on feasibility, tradeoffs, and likely environmental and health benefits. Close with a brief whole-group recognition of the strongest data use, clearest tradeoff analysis, and most realistic recommendation.