North Seattle CoolMom trip to the Recycling Center
Recently, several CoolMom families showed up on a beautiful sunny afternoon at the Waste Management Cascade Recycling Center in Woodinville to partake in a host of lovely smells emanating from the mountain of recyclables inside a large warehouse.
Whoa! That is a lot of garbage!
Actually, Kristin Kinder, the Waste Management Education and Outreach Coordinator regaled us with an entertaining and informative educational presentation.
“I want to talk to you today about two things: garbage and recycling,” she began.
“Where does our garbage go?” “ A landfill,” a child called out.
“That’s right, a landfill! What happens when the garbage gets to the landfill?”
Silence in the room…
Finally someone says, “It just sits there!” “You are right! It does NOTHING!” and Kristin went on to emphasize that anything we throw into the garbage will just sit there for years and years. Kristin asked us to think about how much garbage we generate each week when Waste Management trucks come to the neighborhood for pick up.
“Okay, so do your neighbors generate garbage each week? (chorus of “yeses”) Now imagine that each neighbor puts out a garbage can each week. How about your whole block- how much garbage is that? Now multiply that by every household in Seattle! Is that a lot of garbage?” (chorus of yeses)
Kristin talked about the importance of recycling and what that means. When we recycle things, companies will buy the items and use them to make a product. That is why it is important, Kristin said, to buy products made from recycled goods, because if no one buys them, then the recyclable materials won’t be put to good use and companies will stop making them.
One other thing she said was not to pay attention to the numbers on the bottom of recyclable materials- those are used by the folks who sort the items later. Just go ahead and recycle them. Also, it is hard to recycle individual plastic bags because they get caught in the sorting machine, so it is better to bag up a bunch of them and put them in the recycling bin.
Kristin had the children play a version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” by asking volunteers to pick an object out of a bag and guess (usually with the audience’s help) whether it goes in the garbage or can be recycled.
Finally, we took a brief tour of the warehouse where we saw a bulldozer pushing oodles of materials into a large pile that was slowly being dumped onto a conveyor belt and sorted. My daughter Amy, when asked what she remembered about the tour of the warehouse said it was “very very stinky.”
A big thank you to esteemed CoolMom Maris Sovold who made this happen.
