A great Earth Day activity with kids is a visit to your local trash or recycling center coupled with some fun learning resources. Our city, Phoenix, has a zero waste goal by 2050, and many other cities have similar goals. Earth Day is a great time to educate the little ones on how they can make small differences to help their city achieve these goals! If you're an Arizona local, definitely do a visit at the Phoenix center. But if you're not local, visit the Phoenix center website for a similar experience (virtual tour and resources) right from your home!
Since we're nearby, we were lucky enough to actually go on a real life tour of the City of Phoenix North Gateway Transfer Station and Materials Recovery Facility (MRF), and we all loved it. We set up the tour by giving them a call (info below), and it was completely free!
When touring, you are on a second level - almost on an enclosed bride above the giant facility and overlooking the entire process. One one side, you have the trucks coming in and out. The kids watched trash trucks dump their collected materials in a large pile, while also watching large dump tucks take off with the trash meant for the landfill.
And then on the other side, you have both humans and large machines separating recycling materials into various categories - this was everyone's favorite thing to watch. Our eyes were glued to the workers sorting quickly through recyclables on the conveyor belt!
Our guide was also exceptional - he gave us a LOT of facts and also answered a bunch of our specific questions. The toughest info to swallow included:
Phoenix sends 9 million pounds of trash to the landfill (in 150 semi trucks) every single day. Every single day...
A few years ago they had to dig up an old landfill while building a golf course over it, and they found that a lot of the trash that they expected to disintegrate (e.g. a newspaper) was actually still almost fully intact after decades ... this is scary.
If you put your recyclables in plastic bags, not only might they be thrown out (as workers don't have time to open the bags and check all the contents), but the bags often break their expensive sorting machines by getting stuck in the gears. This was a punch to the gut because we've been using 'recyclable' bags to hold our recyclables!
Needless to say, all this information had us really thinking about how we can do better to protect our planet.
And after the tour, they distributed some cheat sheets and other worksheets for the kids that are also on their website.
Weeks after the tour, our kids continued to ask us if each item was a recyclable or trash... the tour definitely gave them something to think about!
If you're looking to schedule a tour (for adults or kids!), use the info on their website to schedule or just call their Zero Waste Team at (602) 534-0405.
Again, the tour was awesome, but don't skip out on the virtual your if you don't have one in your area or just can't make time for it - just go here for SO many other resources that will make a perfect Earth Day activity at home!
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