“Recycling is fun!” said the 9-year-old. She broke into a sheepish grin. “Wow, I sounded just like a commercial. ‘Hey, kids, recycling is fun!'” she said in smooth huckster tones.
“But it is,” she continued in her own voice. “After all these years of everyone going on about recycle-recycle-recycle, finally it is fun. It’s not about putting stuff in the right trashcan. It’s about using it to make cool things you actually want! For free!”
Recycling has taken hold in our household with a fiendish grip ever since the arrival of a new book from Dorling Kindersley called “Make It!” Written by Jane Bull, the book’s colorful pages contain an amalgam of quirky ideas, photographs, and instructions for turning garbage into goodies.
There is nothing, apparently, that can’t be made into a handsome or useful ornament. Junk mail can be softened and mulched and formed into beads. You can stuff bubble wrap with candy wrappers to make a cushion. A wire hanger, that bane of Joan Crawford’s closet, can be festooned with paper clips, old keys, and the curly wire from a notebook to become … a wire hanger festooned with random metal objects!
Domestic scavengers now pounce on the smallest scraps. There a person might be, innocently cleaning receipts out of her wallet and dropping them in the trash, when —
“Wait! I could make something out of those!”
“What could you make out of CVS receipts?”
“A … a … papier-mache picture frame!”
“You really want my grungy old CVS receipts as part of your picture frame?”
“Sure! They’re cool!”
And what do you know, but soon the child has stirred flour and water to make glue and is carefully pasting receipts — plus strips of newspaper and shreds of street map — to a square of cardboard. Once dried, it makes a dandy picture frame, if an unsteady one.
Very quickly the house is filling up with the results of the children’s resourcefulness. We have two doll pillows, a handbag made of discarded trousers, and on our front porch there’s a bird feeder laden with salted cashews made from the base of a plastic San Pellegrino bottle.
“The squirrels are going to get that before any birds do,” the 11-year-old warned, as her sister made her way out of the door with it.
“That’s OK. I like squirrels.”
“So it’s not a bird feeder, it’s a squirrel feeder.”
“Depends who gets to it first. Right now it’s — oh.”
“Just pick them up off the floor and put them back in again. The birds and squirrels won’t mind.”
The top part of the Pellegrino bottle stayed in the kitchen and now dangles from a cupboard knob. Using scissors, the girls made it into a “sun catcher,” and with its curling petals, the thing really does look rather pretty; like a clear green lily with a screw top.
In the face of such enthusiasm, it seems unsporting to let slip that the recycled treasures are destined to have a relatively short second act. Like the successive collections of broken shells, bottle tops, rubber bands, and weird plastic doohickeys the children have brought home over the years, these too will eventually magically … disappear.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@ washingtonexaminer.com.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
