The Texas Energy Managers Association Conference begins tomorrow in Waco, Texas. If you’ve registered for the conference, join the Watt Watchers team as we review the past year of developments and look forward to new developments in the future. This conference celebrates the tenth year of educating and building community for Texas Energy Managers, and we’re happy to be a part of it.

The Watt Watchers team will provide two sessions across two days to share updates and collect feedback. We’re looking forward to seeing you there.

Earth Day (22 April 2019) is a global event mobilizing millions of people around the world into political and civic participation. Organizations and individuals in more than 190 countries around the world march, sign petitions, meet with elected officials, plant trees, and clean up their towns and roads. Corporations and public sector agencies time their pledges and sustainability measures to this auspicious day.

Look around for opportunities to engage students, parents, and other community leaders on the issues, and check the Earth Day Network for pledges and actions you can implement locally as part of a global initiative. In the next week, set realistic goals for your class, your sports team, or your school and see how you can make a difference.

Discovery Education and Itron, Inc. have teamed up to launch the 2019 Week of Resourcefulness. They will launch a brand new STEM investigation every day of the week. The investigations will be designed for teacher-directed, activity based learning, and they will explore the unexpected connections between energy and water. They will release a companion guide to continue the learning at home.

Conservation Station: Creating a More Resourceful World also contains a virtual field trip focusing on smart cities with a fully developed educator guide and links to additional resources. All content is created in partnership between Discovery Education and Itron with the goal of promoting energy-water literacy and conservation efforts through the innovative use of technology.

Ever wonder what happens to those materials when they go into the blue bin? On today’s Global Recycling Day, take your students the step farther and explore what comes next. Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council created a succinct online reference and game that explains the rest of the recycling lifecycle.

Build your own municipal sorting facility (MSF) by placing different sorting machines along a conveyor in the Super Sorter Game. Follow steel cans, cardboard boxes, cartons, and glass bottles on their way back into your life in the Recycling Journey. With each experience, ask your class if the outcome is expected or if recycling still has some surprises.

The Global Recycling Foundation created Global Recycling Day in 2018 in an effort to get more individuals engaged with the concept of recyclables being a resource rather than waste. Falling on 18 March every year, Global Recycling Day is an opportunity for individuals across your school and community to become laser focused on what they are doing to recycle.

Look around for opportunities to engage students, parents, and other community leaders on the issues, and check the website (linked above) maintained by the Bureau of International Recycling for resources and educational materials for your stakeholders. In the next week, set realistic goals for your class, your sports team, or your school and see how you can make a difference.

Conservation isn’t always about using less. Especially when looking at materials, conservation can take the form of using something for another purpose in order to reduce the overall burden of waste entering landfills. Consider ways to reuse material waste, such as projects celebrating creative expression.

One of the Watt Watchers activities developed as part of the relaunch outlines different ways to reuse common waste materials to tell creative stories or to illustrate scenes from history or literature. Aligned for students from kindergarten through middle school, this interdisciplinary activity looking at Junk Art is sure to provide stimulating context for reusing old materials in new ways.

If you are using the original version of the Watt Watchers materials or the new version currently being released, then you may be interested in becoming a Watt Watchers ambassador. This informal group of educators, energy managers, and other stakeholders meets remotely via teleconference about once per month to discuss the progress of the project, to swap lessons learned and success stories, and to provide valuable suggestions from users to inform the development of the program moving forward.

Participation in the ambassadors program is one way to make your mark on this exciting revitalization of a popular program. Reach out via email to contact@watt-watchers.com in order to join our distribution list. You’ll receive regular updates and meeting invitations that you can join as your schedule permits. We look forward to hearing from you.