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For the Family - Fun Recycling

It’s surprising how clued up children are about recycling and composting these days. Getting all the family involved in your recycling collections at home is a great way to reinforce the recycling message and have fun too. Teaching children about environmental issues at home will help them to grow up with an awareness of the environment and how to conserve it. Whether you use your local council’s kerbside collection or the bring banks at your local supermarket, your kids can get involved in the practical side of recycling and have some fun doing it.

Every time you put a plastic bottle into your recycling collection remember to take off the lid, then wash and squash. Kids love jumping or stamping on the bottles to crush them – this will save space for storage at home and also take up less space on the collection vehicles so they can collect more each time. Aluminum drinks cans will also easily crush in this way too. Although there is no need to separate the aluminium from steel cans at home, you could encourage the children to find out about the different types of metals by testing them with a magnet. Steel will stick to magnet while aluminium will not – they could try and find other magnetic things in your home too.

Children love to make noise! What could be a more satisfying noise than the crashing sound of bottles falling into a bottle bank. When you go to the supermarket take some of your used bottles and jars for recycling and feed them into the bottle banks – it may even make the usual dull shopping trip more enticing!!

For storing your recycling at home you could get your children to design and decorate colourful bins for different kinds of recyclable materials that can be taken to the recycling banks or transferred to bags and boxes for your kerbside collection.

Home composting is another great recycling activity for all the family; kids will love getting outside in the fresh air collecting twigs and leaves – or even worms, as well as turning the compost to help its progress. Composting shows children, almost before their eyes, how food and garden waste can be transformed into rich, re-usable compost that nourishes the earth to grow new plants. When the compost is ready it can be used to plant more seeds.

Its always good to know what actually happens to your recycling after it has been collected so to see what happens next why not take your kids to one of the countys recycling centres.