epic teachers resource site

Teachers in Canada

This website provides comprehensive information and course curricula to help teach students from kindergarten through to the end of secondary school about recycling and plastics, along with short comprehensive tidbits of information on specific subjects such as litter or the different type of plastic codes.

This site is hosted by the Environment and Plastics Industry Council (EPIC), a council of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association. EPIC is dedicated to sustainable plastics recycling and to minimizing plastic waste sent to landfill.

EPIC holds an annual Anti-Litter Calendar contest, where we ask students to submit poster submissions that speak against littering. We then take the top 13 entries and use them in our annual Calendar. For more information and to download our latest calendar, click here.

Get your students involved in the next Anti-Litter Calendar Contest

Don’t forget to get your students involved in the 2010 Anti-Litter Calendar Contest as soon as possible.

Another record year for litter clean up

Thanks to all of the individual and class volunteers who dedicated a few hours of their time to cleaning up Canada’s lakes and shorelines, the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup proved to be another resounding success. The 2007 event cleaned up 1,200 different shoreline sites. To date, litter picked up from these shorelines included more than 269,335 cigarette butts, 105,397 food wrappers and 31,646 glass bottles – and the numbers continue to climb as more information is tallied from across the country.

Polystyrene comes out ahead

Coffee drinkers beware – results from a lifecycle inventory analysis show that the popular trend of doubling up on plastic-coated paperboard coffee cups instead of using a single polystyrene foam cup results in twice as much energy and solid waste volume, over five times as much solid waste by weight, and nearly twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as the use of a single polystyrene cup.

Plastic bags getting recycled

More and more grocery retailers are helping Canadians increase the recycling of plastic bags by setting up in-store recycling boxes in their stores. And those bags are being turned into exciting new products, like plastic composite lumber used in decking and furniture.