Things Around Us
Taking charge of waste
Sort waste into the green bin and the blue bin and say why each one goes there, and know what reduce, reuse and recycle each mean.
Look around a market or a street corner and you find piles of it: old clothes, tins, bottles, paper, vegetable peels, plastic wrappers, pencil shavings, old batteries. The chapter's question is not who dropped it. It is what we could have done instead, and it gives three answers in order.
Reduce, then reuse, then recycle
The first rule is to reduce — make less waste in the first place, by avoiding wrappers and plastic bottles and carrying a cloth bag. The second is to reuse — a quilt from old sarees, a bag from old clothes, paper used on one side kept for rough work. Recycling comes after both: making new objects out of metal, glass, plastic or paper that has been thrown away.
Have a play
Two dustbins, and the reason they are two different colours.
Tap any part of the picture.
Worked example
You have finished a bottle of water. Reduce, reuse or recycle — which comes first?
Start at the top of the list. Could you have avoided buying it?
Reduce is the first rule because a bottle you did not buy needs neither reusing nor recycling.
Try it together
Now work through why loose rubbish makes people ill, together.
The chapter draws a chain from a garbage pile to somebody's fever.
1.Waste water collects in puddles and runs along the road. The chapter says one kind of insect increases because of it. Which?
Have a go
Your turn. The chapter states its aim in four words. Which four?
Ready to practise?
Eight questions on what you have just read. Nothing is timed, and you can play as many times as you like.