3 R's

Be forewarned! I am stepping up on my soapbox a bit for this rambling post.

I have been working on tweaking a lesson plan this week. Its called Recycled Art and as the name implies, we talk a bit about energy and recycling before making something "useful" out of trash. More often than not, trash is made from trash and not a whole lot is gained from the lesson.

One of the questions most commonly asked by the students (who are usually in 5th grade) is how an item gets recycled. You can tell them that the soda can they drink from today will be recycled and made into a new can and back on store shelves within 60 days but really how does the process work? The activity I am working on breaks the recycling process of common items (plastic bottle, aluminum can, paper etc) into 4 steps. The students then must put the steps in the correct order. Its a quick activity but hopefully it will give the students a visual of how things work.

Me at the National Zoo in DC grossed out by the number of plastic bags...

While research the recycling process and trying to find pictures, I came across some insane facts about the American lifestyle and all the trash that comes with it. Here are a few that just floor me.

1. The average American uses 1,200 plastic bags per year - when added together that amounts to more 380 Billion plastic bags a year!
2. The highest point in the state of Ohio is Mount Rumpke - a landfill which is literally a mountain of trash!
3. The average American uses 7 trees worth of paper products each year. In fact, just to print all of today's Sunday papers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
4. An estimated 80,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using enough aluminum foil to cover over 50 acres of space -- that's almost 40 football fields. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it
5. The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world's people generate 40% of the world's waste.

All of these really made me think - I realize that our current culture is use and throw away. I am guilty of it too. But if all of us changed our daily habitats just a little that could add up to a BIG reduction in our waste. Take the plastic shopping bag for example. These are a single use item that end up everywhere; including our oceans where sea turtle and shore birds mistake them for food such as jellyfish. I now carry my reusable bags with me and rarely use plastic these days which, as a bonus, saves me a couple cents. Other countries are taking a bigger stand. At the start of the year, Italy banned the plastic bags. How? They put a large tax on them making it more economical for people to bring their own in. Which unfortunately seems to be one of the few ways to get peoples attention these days.

I hope to have my lesson plan and activities up and running in the next month. We'll see how it goes over with the kiddo's. At least in the process I learned a bit more about what exactly happens to all my trash.