One Person's Trash Is Another Person's Treasure...

Ahhh.. Spring is in the air, time for a little spring cleaning... out with the old, in with the new! But wait! We don't just want to throw away our old junk... what could we do? We Tree Snakes know just what to do!

RECYCLE!!

That's right, our April meeting was spent doing just that. We recycled some old crayons into some totally fabulous new ones to color with. Goodness, these are exciting! Take a look!

Melted Crayons...

We know everyone will want to color with these cool crayons, here's how we did it! First we took the paper off the crayons and broke them into little pieces. Next we put the broken pieces (of various colors) into a mini-muffin tin (we discovered that non-stick mini-muffin tins work best...Thanks, Helema!) and finally we melted the crayons in the oven. When all the crayons were melted, we took the tins out, let them cool, and popped them into the freezer so that the wax would be hard enough for us to get our new crayons out. They turned out fabulous!

Our Finished Crayons

We also made recycled paper from scraps we had around the Eco-Village. Here are some pictures of us preparing. We made a giant piece of paper to use as a poster to tell others about our group. It's going to turn out awesome!

First we had to rip up paper and let it soak in water...

Shredded Paper soaking in water... the first step!

Next the paper goes into the blender to become pulp!

Finally, the pulp gets poured onto the screen and when it dries, we've got paper!

Last but not least, we learned about what happens to the trash that we can't recyle when it gets sent to a landfill. What better way to learn about this than with a SNACK! That's right, we had edible landfills and they were yummy! Don't forget to chew your trash before you swallow!

This puts a whole new perspective on eating "garbage"!