If you need to teach your kids about recycling and waste management, you need to inculcate a culture of reduce, reuse and recycle in their lives.
Be an example to teach your kids Reduce, Reuse and Recycle –
Show them how you do it first while shopping, at home, or on the go and they will follow.
- Say ‘NO’ to disposable shopping bags and start bringing the reusable bags or baskets for shopping.
- Use least possible packaging.
- Buy things in bulk. Why? When we buy in bulk then we reduce the packaging by twice or thrice.
- Prefer buying concentrated detergents and liquids.
- Replace plastic with metals and glass whenever possible.
- Purchase reusable stuff rather than disposable. For an example, buy metal kitchen dishes, napkins.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle together with kids
Kids love fun and doing it rather than listening to your monologue and doing it. So, best is to do it together.
Experiment
Create a mini landfill : Try and create a small landfill in the backyard or some corner of garden or home and tell kids to put all types of waste material – packaging, plastic, tins etc. Ask them how it feels and what would they like to do about it? You could do so with your community kids or even as a school project.
Games and DIY
Turn around some waste and recycle them along with your kids. Some of the things you can do-
Green money plant trail out of used plastic pet bottles.
Paper Mache decorative products
Recycle old newspaper or books into beautiful paper Mache products. You can give them any shape using your creativity.
Set up a upscale garage sale or community shop
Kids will value more if you make it lucrative too. Let them understand that by reusing and recycling, they can not only saving ma earth, but can make money too. Once your kids have their own collection of beautiful things useful or decorative, guide them to set up a small sale or participate in their next school or community fair. When they will sell and earn out of it, they will be a motivation to many more.
At Skip Skip Bins, our endeavour is to create and sustainable earth culture within communities. Watch out more for this space for more interesting posts or suggest us what would you like us to talk about in our next posts.