Wetland Edge Environmental Center (WEEC)

Indorama Ventures Xylenes and PTA supports a unique program with the Decatur, Alabama city school system consisting of an environmental learning center known as Wetlands Edge Environmental Center (WEEC). The company provides the building and land while the local school system provides teachers and the curriculum. To enhance traditional classroom training, students are taken to the center on field trips.

Since opening in 2002, WEEC has educated more than 80,000 students, teachers and visitors by providing hands-on, environmental "place-based" educational opportunities across the K-16 curriculum to all who visit. The WEEC facility consists of a building showcasing aquatic life, including two floors of touch tanks, a 1,650-gallon marine tank, and a 780-gallon freshwater ecosystem. In addition, more than two miles of trails traverse the 320 acre habitat enabling visitors to see several diverse ecosystems including a swamp, a marsh, bottomland hardwoods, upland species, young pines, and one of the largest white oak trees in the world.

This award-winning wildlife habitat is certified through the Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC), a nonprofit, non-lobbying organization dedicated to increasing the quality and amount of wildlife habitat on corporate, private and public lands. These programs have earned the plant site certification from the WHC for both “Wildlife at Work” and “Corporate Lands for Learning.” The site is also a listed site on Alabama’s Birding Trail.

WEEC’s objectives are as follows:

• To create an understanding of the natural environment and the interrelationships among living things.
• To promote sound stewardship and wise management of our natural resources for the benefit of people and all living things.
• To create an awareness of local, national and global environmental problems and foster sound decision-making regarding their solutions.
• To enrich, vitalize, extend, complement and combine all content areas of the K-12 school curriculum by means of first-hand observation and direct experience outside the classroom.
• To develop programs that are constructivist, provide a venue for placed-based education, and are directly correlated to the National Science Standards, Decatur City Schools Hands-on Activities Science Program (HASP), the Alabama Course of Study and High School Graduation Exam requirements.
• To emphasize the concept of biodiversity, a global issue with far-reaching implications that encompasses sustainable development, corporate and social environmental accountability and relationships with local and indigenous communities, and
• To educate students on the importance and responsibility of industry, and how manufacturing must not only be sustainable but enhance the surrounding environment.

Visit for more information: https://weec.dcs.edu/