Planet Earth is blessed with resources that promote and sustain life on earth and are of great value of to humans in one form or the other. However, the advancement of modern civilization has had a great impact on our planet’s natural resources. We have still not realized the true value of these resources.
Conserving natural resources is very essential today. There are many ways that one can conserve natural resources. All we need to do is to look around and see what natural resources we are using and find out ways to limit our usage. With this in mind the Social Studies lesson in Class 8 on the concept of Three R’s was introduced to the young Stafordians—Reduce , Reuse and Recycle. They came up with really wonderful creations using waste materials like empty cold-drink bottles, newspapers, disposable glasses and spoons, egg trays, electric wire and left over craft materials. A Piggy bank, an electric lamp, a toy trolley, decoration items, paper bags of different sizes, and a pen stand, to name a few. The activity BEST OUT OF WASTE focused on minimizing the usage of available resources and recycling the commonly accessible waste material enabling them to use the resources judiciously and developing the habit of conserving our natural resources.
At the end of the day, the children came up with the following ideas and resolved to adopt the Three R’s in our daily life—
REDUCE – Buy and use less stuff. This is the best way to conserve natural resources.
REUSE – Using something over and over again before recycling, composting, or throwing it away is a great way to extend the life of things, which in turn saves precious natural resources!
Here are some good ideas we listed, for reuse:
- Write on both sides of paper.
- Drink from glass or reusable hard, plastic cups instead of throwaway paper or throwaway plastic ones.
- Use cloth towels and napkins instead of paper towels and napkins.
- Turn old clothes into new clothes by trading with a friend.
- Take a cloth bag to the grocery store instead of using a paper or plastic bag.
- Use the comic pages from the newspaper or old maps as wrapping paper.
RECYCLE – Turn something old into something new. Recycling means we don’t have to get more natural resources to make new things.
Here’s what we can recycle:
- All clean paper like old homework, newspapers, magazines, phone books, junk mail, and cereal boxes.
- All metal cans including soda cans.
- All plastic bottles like water bottles, milk jugs, vitamin bottles, laundry soap bottles.