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As
parents one of our key roles is to teach our children how to
look after themselves and others when they leave the safety of
our homes and start their own lives without us. Teaching our
children about looking after our planet should begin when they
are young and the lessons they learn then will be ones they will
use throughout their lives. One of the easiest ways to start is
to teach your children about recycling. By understanding what we
can reuse and what we can’t, we can help make a difference to
our planet.
So where do you start and how
young?
Around the age of four, children can start taking part in
sorting out what is rubbish and what is recycling, with parental
help. A simple checklist placed on the fridge will do. Recycling
items should include plastics, paper, metal, glass and fruit and
vegetable waste.
Create labelled containers for each of the recycling items, i.e.
one for glass, one for metal, one for plastics and one for
paper. Food scraps can go into a container somewhere in the
kitchen. Encourage all members of the family to use these
containers and help with the recycling.
Fruit and vegetable waste
When you are preparing
vegetables or fruit, it is a
good idea to show your children that we can use these scraps to
make food for the plants that we grow around the home, by making
compost.
Keep a small container just big enough for a day’s scraps and at
the end of the day get the children to help you put these scraps
into the compost bin.
A
compost bin is a large container in the garden in which the
plant material can break down naturally. The heat that is
created while the waste matter is decomposing helps with this
process, as does the activity of worms breaking down food
scraps.
Ideally you should have two compost bins, one for current food
scraps and the other for mature compost. Compost needs to be
turned over every week or so and a garden fork is ideal for
this. There are many different compost bins available and a
visit to your local garden centre will be useful in finding out
which ones would be suitable for your home garden.
Recycling paper
It
today’s world we seem to be inundated with paper in many shapes
and forms. Newspapers, printed paper, junk mail, old magazines
and wrapping paper are just a few of the sorts of paper material
children can find that can be recycled. You will need to check
with your local council to find out what paper products they
won’t accept, but on the whole most can be recycled. Get the
children to sort out paper for recycling once a week, putting
the scrap paper into tidy piles tied up with string.
When paper is recycled it is sorted and chopped up. It is then
cleaned with hot water and mashed up. It makes a sort of
porridge mixture which is called pulp. The pulp is then squeezed
to get rid of all the water and squashed flat, so that it can be
dried and pressed into smooth, flat paper. Once this is done it
can be used again as recycled paper. Encourage your children to
choose recycled paper rather than new paper when looking for
writing material and they can be saving a tree as well.
Recycling glass
Most councils will take glass bottles and jars for recycling. It
is quite good fun to take the children to a recycling collection
station and have them put the different coloured glass into the
right containers. However, do make sure your children wear
sealed shoes, as there is often a lot of broken glass around the
bins.
When glass is recycled it is crushed and melted and then made
into new glass bottles and jars. Some recycled glass is used to
make glass beads for jewellery.
Make sure when you recycle your glass jars and bottles that they
are clean. It’s not a very pleasant job to handle dirty bottles
and they can attract unwanted pests if left outside until
recycling day.
Recycling metal
When you open a can of baked beans, did you know that you can
recycle this food tin? The most common metals you can recycle
are aluminium and steel which are used to make drink cans and
food tins. Recycled metal is sorted, crushed and melted down and
then reused to make more cans and other metal products.
Recycling plastic
When you last went grocery shopping, did you get your groceries
packed in a plastic bag or a recycle carry bag? Plastic is one
of our planet’s most polluting products. It takes a long time
for plastic to break down and this is the main reason for our
landfills getting clogged up. Encourage your children to use
reuseable drink bottles rather than get a new bottle of water
from the store. When you go grocery shopping take reusable cloth
bags rather than have your groceries packed in plastic bags.
Some plastics can be recycled, however, and these are marked
with the recycle number 1 or 2 inside the triangle recycling
symbol. Teach your children to look for these signs and
encourage them to put these plastics into the recycling bin.
Plastics marked with numbers 3 or higher may not be accepted for
recycling – check with your local council.
Make it a family project for a month to see if you can reduce
the amount of rubbish you put out each week. These simple
lessons learnt now will be ones your children will take with
them into their futures and will make a difference to how much
rubbish ends up in our landfills.
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