What's All This About Recycling???

This week, Rimu class got the opportunity to visit our local Waste Management Sites to look at Recycling. The trip was a chance for us to reflect on how much we are personally recycling and what we can do to help our families recycle more and therefore create less waste.

We firstly looked at Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover and Residual Disposal.

Chris (the Educator for Waste Management) told the group that went in the morning that they were only the second class he's ever worked with (and he said he had worked with lots!!!!) to ever get the words in the right order on the first go.  Way to go guys, that was an awesome effort!

After that the children had to go through the process of recycling items that people put in their yellow bins, just the way the machine at Eco Sort does. They had to sort all of this waste starting with removing all the contaminated objects (those things that have been put in the yellow bin but that just can't be recycled).

Next the children worked in pairs to match up raw materials with what the material looks like after it has been recycled and an object it has been recycled into. Not the easiest of tasks.

Finally we headed off to the Eco Shop and each pair was given a budget of $500. We had to pretend we were leaving home for the first time and setting up a new flat so we had to find items for our flat. We were surprised at the amazing bargains we could get. It was really exciting to "shop" for our flats. We found some great things but unfortunately we couldn't find beds but we decided that was ok and we would just sleep on the really comfy couches we found :)

Recycling Rocks!!!!