Growing up I remember having a garbage can under our kitchen sink, and then the next week out of the blue there was also a big bin under there that I was told was to use for recycling. I’m not sure if it was for my brother’s scout project, but now that I think about it, it probably was. A few months ago when we lived in our old house we found out that we could get the Blue Can and start recycling. We decided to pay the extra $2 a month to get it and start recycling. I’ll admit I was pretty wasteful and never went to the big bins in town to recycle stuff, so I thought it would be good to encourage our children and teach them what can and can’t be recycled. I never really knew what could go in there, so I only put our big cardboard boxes from shopping at Costco in there. I still didn’t feel like I was doing a good job recycling.
What Can I Recycle?
My son told me that there was a list on the can that said what we can and can’t recycle, but when I had trash I didn’t want to walk out to the can to see if it could be recycled! My husband and I were just called to be the Webelos scout leaders and one of the projects was to help our community in a project to encourage them to recycle. I couldn’t figure out what to do for our project, so I thought about what I needed to recycle better. I realized I needed a list in my house by my garbage can of what I can and can not recycle. I asked the boy scouts if they thought it would be a good idea to make a flyer with the Cans and Can’ts of recycling and deliver it to our neighbors. They thought it was a great idea and headed out side to write down all the stuff on the lid of the blue can! They came up with what to put on the flyer and I helped them type it out. We delivered the flyer to about 30 people and gave the boys some to take home! I have two cans, a garbage can and now a recycling can that are next to each other. I put the flyer above them so that I can know what to recycle and we have been doing so much better. We were waisting so much stuff before.
So why recycle? Why it is important. There are so many reasons, but I recently read an article about 5 ways recycling helps or planet….
- Recycling helps minimize pollution.
- Recycling helps preserve our natural resources.
- Recycling gives green jobs
- Recycling helps create awareness.
- Recycling saves expenses and resources.
Print off this flyer by right clicking and saving it to your desktop and start recycling today. If you don’t have a recycling can to help you, there are a lot of business that have big dumpsters to help us recycle stuff.
There are so many other ways to recycle and it’s an important thing to teach our children!