Triple R Ranger

Title: Triple R Ranger
Description: Become a reduce, reuse, and recycle ranger by learning about which items can be recycled and which cannot.
Season: All year
Length of Activity: 1 hour
Age: 3-10

Triple R Ranger
Did you know that the average United States American tosses approximately 4.4 pounds of trash every single day? That may not seem like much but when you calculate that annually you get roughly 1,600 pounds a year. Now keep in mind that there are around 324 million people living in this country. That’s roughly 265,720,000 pounds of trash every year! Enough to fill more than 23 million garbage trucks each year!
Where does it all go?
Unfortunately, about half of it will meet its fate in one of more than 2,000 active landfills across the country
The other half? Well it depends on people like you and me to collect, clean, sort, and deliver it to a recycling center.
Do you know which items you can recycle and which items you can’t?
Let’s take a look.

Supplies and Tools needed:
Garbage from all different categories.
1 sheet of paper
Colored pencils
Safety pin
Tape

Getting started

Step 1: Lay out all different kinds of garbage. Try to use items that are recognizable in your household.
Step 2: Ask your child or children if they know what it means to recycle.
Step 3: Can you guess which items can be recycled and which items are simply trash?
Step 4: Hold a discussion about where trash goes when we are done with it.
Step 5: Have your child or children sort garbage into different categories, for example: paper, glass, metal and plastic.
Step 6: Once they have sorted all of the items cut and decorate your “ranger’s” star.
Step 6: Tape a safety pin to the back and then adorn it just over their heart.

Taking it Deeper
Show them how there are several different kinds of items within each category. For example, within paper we have writing paper, paper towels, newspaper, tissue, toilet paper, paperboard, paper plate, cardboard, etc.

Host a discussion about how you might work together as a family to reduce, reuse, recycle and even rethink the items that you purchase on a regular basis.

Plan a family outing to pick up trash in your neighborhood and then sort the items into garbage and recycling. Perhaps you can even plan a visit to a nearby recycling center or landfill so they can see, up close and personally, where their trash goes.