Greening Steps

The biggest eating holiday of the year is upon us. Well, maybe Super Bowl Sunday is bigger, but, nonetheless, Thanksgiving is big. It is big in many ways. Not only do you have to break out the sweatpants to make room for the extra indulgences, but your recycle bins are also likely to be busting at the seams. While you hit the malls and the gym the following day, your recycle bin isn't so lucky.

Every day Americans use 100,000,000 steel cans. On Thanksgiving, we are likely to use around 200,000,000. All of those cans that hold our beloved green beans for the green bean casserole, the cranberry sauce, and the pumpkin for the traditional pumpkin pie are all part of this huge increase.

I recently embarked upon a journey through the brains of 5th graders. As part of an educational segment on the 3 R's and recycling in general it is interesting to see the differences in what kids know and how much or how little they know about certain things. And while this journey took me through weird alternate dimensions, there are some lessons I have taken away from this experience.

First, kids know more than you think they do. I was surprised to find out that they pretty much all knew that their trash was taken to landfills. (We don't' have any incinerators in our area) And I was also surprised to find that several knew that landfills produced methane gas. It seems like this topic isn't a very popular one but they did understand, for the most part, how a landfill works. When we got to the recycling part, many did know that you recycle to save resources and that their materials were made into new things.

They are all over the country. You can even find one right here in Normal, Illinois! Recyclable materials fly off the floor and float along the second story of the building. Materials fly this way and that without any explanation of what is happening. Before you know it, steel cans fly off the belt and disappear into thin air. Not too far from there Aluminum cans are being thrown 3 feet away! In other areas in the building you see bottles flying off and disappearing, and paper falls into a black hole, never to be seen again!

Ok, so maybe it isn't haunted but the sorting of the material by sophisticated machinery makes the process feel like there is paranormal influence. Most people would say they have never seen ghostly spirits, much like a material recovery facility. It is an amazing thing to see, and you can catch multiple glimpses of the spirits in action right on YouTube. Did you see anything you may have recently recycled?

I hear a lot of these myths repeated over and over (because if you say something enough it has to be true, right?), and I wanted to set the record straight.

Myth 1: You have to remove the caps from your bottles before you recycle them because the cap and the bottle are different kinds of plastic.