by Ruth Kamnitzer (Sustainability Coordinator)
For kids, recycling can be an abstract concept. At 9 letters it is a long word, and though a bit of it sounds like bicycle, collecting ‘recycling’ and bringing it into school doesn’t seem to have much to do with having fun on bikes. Furthermore, we tell them to put their ‘recycling’ in special bins (that look suspiciously like garbage cans), but they never see anything new come out of the bins. Is ‘recycling’ a kind of magic, or a monster, or a machine? What actually happens to the cardboard, plastic, cans and paper? Or is ‘recycling’ just one of these things that parents tell their kids to do, like wash behind their ears so cauliflowers won’t grow (or is that something only my mother said?).
Yet kids are actually instinctive recyclers, and to illustrate this, I told them a little story today during the Lower Primary weekly assembly. The story went like this . …
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Samantha, who was a very very lucky girl because on her birthday her mother gave her a big box of lego. Samantha was very happy, because she loved lego, so she got started right away. First she built a car, a wonderful car with doors that opened and rocket boosters at the back to make it go extra fast. She played and played with the car and then she decided that what she wanted to build next was a plane. So Samantha reached inside the box of lego that she got for her birthday and luckily she had some blocks left,so she built herself a wonderful plane. Samantha was very happy. Then after a few days she was tired of playing with her car and her plane and she decided that what she wanted to build next was a motorcycle. A wonderful idea. So Samantha looked inside the box again and she saw that she didn’t have very many pieces left but luckily there was just enough to build a motorcycle. Samantha was happy and played with her motorcycle for many days, until eventually she decided that she didn’t want to play with her car and she didn’t want to play with her plane and she didn’t want to play with her motorcycle -- she wanted to build a beautiful house that was two floors high with a pointy roof and windows. Only, when she looked in her box she saw that she didn’t have any lego bricks left.
‘Oh no.’ I asked them, ‘What should Samantha do?’
‘She should break up the plane and the car and motorbike and use the pieces to build a house’, the kids all yelled out, just as I knew they would.
And that, of course, is what recycling is all about; breaking up our old things to make new things, so that we don’t run out of resources (and cause a whole bunch of other environmental problems too).
I hope this mornings assembly had an impact on your children, and that they will remember to bring in your paper, cardboard, plastic, cans and glass into school for recycling.
