These environmental trivia questions and answers run in four rounds: recycling and waste, climate change and its science, ecology, and air, water and wild places.
Read the full guide
Recycling trivia questions
Recycling and waste asks what the numbers on plastic mean, which country started bottle deposits in 1884, and what downcycling, closed-loop recycling and urban mining are.
Climate change trivia questions and answers
Climate change and its science is history and physics, not forecasts: who proposed the greenhouse effect and whose curve records carbon dioxide. Ecology trivia questions come next (the word's Greek root, keystone species, symbiosis), then Air, water and wild places.
Tips
For Earth Day, play Recycling and waste first.
Questions and answers
Are there global warming trivia questions and answers?
Yes, in the climate round. The article it was read in notes that global warming and climate change have often been used interchangeably since the 1980s, so one round serves both.
Do these work as environmental science trivia questions and answers?
Yes, for a class: the four rounds are waste and recycling, climate, ecology, and the atmosphere and water. Each answer links the article where it can be checked.
Are there sustainability trivia questions?
The recycling round is the nearest: the waste hierarchy of reduce, reuse and recycle, closed-loop recycling, downcycling and urban mining.
What are some easy environmental trivia questions?
Which step comes third in the three Rs? Carbon dioxide emissions come mainly from burning what? Rivers are part of which cycle? The answers are recycle, fossil fuels and the hydrological cycle.
How were the answers checked?
Each was read on October 3, 2026 in one of four English Wikipedia articles: Recycling, Climate change, Ecology and Natural environment. Rates, temperatures and forecasts are left out because they change every year.
A material is recycled into a different product of lower quality. What is that called?Answer: Downcycling. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
A material is recycled into the same product with no significant loss of quality. What is that called?Answer: Closed-loop recycling. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, recycling aluminum cans saves about how much of the energy needed to make aluminum from its ore?Answer: 95 percent. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
Drop-off centers and buy-back centers are two of the three main ways of collecting recyclables. What is the third?Answer: Curbside collection. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
In 1813 Benjamin Law of Batley, Yorkshire, found a way to turn rags into recycled wool. What was it called?Answer: Shoddy. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
In the United States, plastic marked with the number 1 is which resin, common in soft drink and water bottles?Answer: Polyethylene terephthalate. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
In the waste hierarchy of the three Rs, which step comes third?Answer: Recycle. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
What is it called when a plant sorts mixed recyclables automatically?Answer: Single-stream recycling. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
Which country set up an official system of refundable deposits on bottles in 1884?Answer: Sweden. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
Which resin number marks polystyrene, the plastic of egg cartons and clamshell containers?Answer: 6. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
Which term was coined for treating the metal already in use in society as a mine above the ground?Answer: Urban mining. Source: Wikipedia: Recycling
Climate change and its science 12
Carbon dioxide emissions come mainly from burning what?Answer: Fossil fuels. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
The long record of rising carbon dioxide is called a "curve" after the scientist who began it. Who was he?Answer: Charles Keeling. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Starting in 1859, who established that nitrogen and oxygen are transparent to radiated heat?Answer: John Tyndall. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Trees and ice cores are examples of what, used to learn about the climate of the past?Answer: Climate proxies. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Under which agreement of 2015 did nations agree to keep warming "well under 2 °C"?Answer: The Paris Agreement. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Until 1970 the warming from greenhouse gases was offset by cooling from emissions of which gas?Answer: Sulfur dioxide. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Where has more than 90 percent of the extra heat energy in the climate system been stored?Answer: In the ocean. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Which is the biggest single contributor to the greenhouse effect, at about half?Answer: Water vapor. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Which report of 1979 supported the accuracy of climate models that forecast warming?Answer: The Charney Report. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Who proposed the greenhouse effect in the 1820s?Answer: Joseph Fourier. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Who published the first climate model of its kind in 1896?Answer: Svante Arrhenius. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Who showed in 1856 that sunlight warms air holding carbon dioxide more than it warms dry air?Answer: Eunice Newton Foote. Source: Wikipedia: Climate change
Ecology 10
Ecology is built on the Greek "oikos". What is an oikos?Answer: A house. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
Pierre Verhulst turned Malthus's principle of population growth into which model?Answer: The logistic equation. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
The term "keystone species" takes its name from the keystone of which structure?Answer: An arch. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
What are organisms called that take in energy by photosynthesis?Answer: Autotrophs. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
What did Linnaeus call the early branch of ecology that he founded?Answer: The economy of nature. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
What is it called when organisms move soil about as they feed and travel through it?Answer: Bioturbation. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
When there is a physical connection between a host and its associate, what is the relationship called?Answer: Symbiosis. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
Which hypothesis, named after a Greek goddess, describes a feedback loop made by the metabolism of living things?Answer: The Gaia hypothesis. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
Who published the first American ecology book in 1905?Answer: Frederic Clements. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
Wind rising up a slope expands, and its moisture condenses. What is this called?Answer: Orographic lift. Source: Wikipedia: Ecology
Air, water and wild places 10
A few rivers never reach a sea, a lake or another river. What happens to them?Answer: They flow into the ground and dry up. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
About how long does the evidence suggest life has existed on Earth?Answer: 3.7 billion years. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
Earth science names a sphere each for rocks, water, air and life. Which is the sphere of water?Answer: The hydrosphere. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
Of the five oceans, which ranks fourth in size, larger only than the Arctic?Answer: The Southern Ocean. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
Old English "wildeor" lies behind our "wilderness". What was a wildeor?Answer: A wild beast. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
The outermost layer of the atmosphere is made mainly of which two gases?Answer: Hydrogen and helium. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
Rivers are part of which cycle?Answer: The hydrological cycle. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
Some scientists add a sphere for ice to the four spheres of the Earth. What is it called?Answer: The cryosphere. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
The stratopause is the boundary between the stratosphere and which layer above it?Answer: The mesosphere. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
What is the study of streams and waterways called?Answer: Surface hydrology. Source: Wikipedia: Natural environment
How this list was compiled
Written for this site; nothing was copied from another list. Questions and wrong choices are our own. Each explanation restates, in our own sentences, a fact from the English Wikipedia article named and linked beside the question (https://en.wikipedia.org, text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license): Recycling, Climate change, Ecology and Natural environment. The text of each article was fetched on October 2 or 3, 2026, and on October 3, 2026 the passage that states each fact was read in it before the question was kept. Left out on purpose: every figure that a new year changes (recycling rates, emissions, temperatures, sea level), forecasts, policy targets other than the dated agreements named, and what other trivia sets on this site already ask (the greenhouse effect in a child's words, the ozone hole, the three arrows of the recycling symbol, composting, the Kyoto Protocol, producers, trophic levels, the biomes and carrying capacity). Levels are our estimate: easy is fair for any table, medium suits people who know the subject, hard will stump most tables. Each question also carries the date its article was read (checkedOn). Licence: own work