DIY Home Recycle Station

The little ones have been learning about importance of recycling at preschool, and we too had been recycling our items as much as possible to reduce wastage. I bring a cloth bag for grocery shopping and occasionally bring our old papers / clothes / plastic bottles for recycling - as and when I'm not too lazy.

I thought we were doing sufficient at our personal level, until I watched a recent documentary program about this village in Japan that actually recycled over 92% of its waste... that is one amazing effort! They even setup stores for people to exchange their unwanted items, such as clothes, cutlery, household items etc (basically one person's junk can be another person's treasure, isn't it?) to further reduce unnecessary wastage. The philosophy is simple - one day our Earth will be too full of junk, where are we going to evacuate all the rubbish we leave behind? To the third world countries? To the outer space? We will run out of clean living space, not in the next 10 years but definitely sooner than we know... 

The documentary got me thinking.. I'm sure the average Malaysian households produce way more wastage than that (I doubt if we even achieved 10% of recycle rate on overall). If we don't start doing something about it, it will only get worse.

So I had the idea of setting up our very own recycling station at home, using this abandoned cloth hanger that had been sitting idle in our backyard.

This is it, our cheap & no-frill DIY recycling station.

I placed a plastic sheet over it so it can blocks of rainwater while function as a green house for my hanging plants (mint, money plants etc). They are so growing well and hanging them in the front row actually beautify the place too.

Here's what we have at the recycling station.

The light plastic baskets (RM5.30 from daiso) allow visibility and do not collect stagnant water nor result to smell. Once the baskets are full, we just move them to our car boot and drop the items off at the collection centre. Easy peasy. 

For the food scrap, I collect them in a separate bin (at the bottom) to make compost for my garden. I'm newbie to composting but I can always learn to improve, so there's no excuse of "I don't know how". At least now our food scraps (especially all the fruits or veggie fiber after juicing, those are super nutrients for the soil!) don't go to waste anymore..

I have been training E and C to sort out the rubbish according to their place, including the envelopes from our daily mails. This has really reduce the actually amount of real rubbish in our thrash bin, and the duo are feeling proud of themselves. :-) 

That's all about our little recycling station, please do begin one at your home of space allow, for the betterment of ourselves and our next generation. 

Besides, if you have any suggestion to make this works even better, I would really love to hear from you! ;-)

Cheers,

PH




Copyrights © Pui Hua and Fun With Little Ones, 2012 - present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any materials/photos within this website without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Pui Hua and Fun With Little Ones with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Be a Fan