(bright upbeat music) - Hi, welcome to "Room 9", the region's largest classroom.

I'm Briana Trager, and today I'm gonna be teaching science for early learners.

And today we're gonna be talking about recycling.

Do know what recycling is?

Have you heard that word before?

Recycling means to take something that would normally be trash that we would normally throw away and turn it into something usable again.

So instead of throwing it away, we re-use it.

Recycling is a way to reduce the amount of garbage or trash that's in our landfills, and helps to keep our planet clean and healthy.

Today we're gonna learn about what recycling is.

We're gonna talk about some easy and fun ways that you can recycle at home, and we're also gonna learn a little bit about how to recycle properly so that you could try it at home, too.

Let's start by talking about a really fun and easy way that you can recycle things in your own home.

So, when we're recycling, we're taking something that would typically no longer be needed and we're tempted to throw it away, but instead we find a new way to use it.

A really fun way to do this is to get creative and craft something or make something new and useful for your home.

I'm gonna show you some examples of ways that you can use creative crafts to recycle items from around your home.

And when I show you these pictures, I want you to see if you can notice what recycled item were they using to make this new thing.

We'll see if we can spot all of the recycled items in these next pictures.

(soft bright music) This type of recycling is really easy because you can use anything in your home.

Sometimes we call this upcycling, meaning we're finding things in our home and finding a new, creative way to use them.

So this is a great way to start to think about things that you were originally gonna throw away, and finding new, fun ways to use them again.

Thinking about items like plastic tubes, plastic bottles, glass jars.

The opportunities are endless of ways that you can recycle or upcycle these things.

What are some ideas that you might have for items like this?

I imagine taking this glass milk jar and painting it and decorating it to create a beautiful vase for flowers.

Or maybe taking this plastic container and adding some feet on the bottom and creating a piggy bank, making a slot at the top so that you could store change or money inside.

There are so many different ways to find things around your home that you can recycle or upcycle, and getting to use your creativity and artistic abilities is really fun.

Recycling or upcycling at home is something we can do on our own, but another type of recycling is a much bigger version where we need help from others to really take the things that we were originally only gonna throw away and turn them into something new.

Maybe you've seen this symbol before.

This is the recycling symbol, and it lets you know that if something is able to be recycled.

You might see it on different trash bins showing that the items inside of that should be recycled, or you might even see it on different items or containers that show that those things are able to be recycled.

For this type of recycling you may do this at home or you may see them at parks or the zoo.

And this is when we sort out our trash and we decide what things truly are trash and what things could be recycled, and we send those things that are able to be recycled off so that a big plant or a big building can take these recyclables and turn them into something new.

So this symbol is one that you can keep an eye out for when you're wondering if something is recyclable or not.

A lot of times, if you have plastic containers and you look at the bottom, you might see that symbol, but sometimes on things like this roll of cardboard, which is able to be recycled, you might not always see the symbol.

So it's also important to know what types of things can and can't be recycled.

So let's do a quick activity to learn a little bit more about the types of things that can be recycled.

Let's look at some pictures of different types of trash that you might have in your home, and think about which ones are able to be recycled and which are going to end up in your trash can.

So we'll start with this apple peel.

If you've ever eaten an apple at home, you've probably seen these in your trash can, and these are something that needs to be thrown away.

Apple cores and other types of food cannot be recycled, so these are going to be trash.

This is an aluminum can.

Something like a can of soup or maybe canned vegetables might come in an aluminum can like this, and this can be recycled.

So as long as you rinse it out, instead of throwing this in the trash can this can be recycled and reused as something new.

Next, we have a banana peel.

We mentioned before that food cannot be recycled, so this one also cannot be recycled and is gonna go in the trash.

Paper is another thing that you might often think about throwing away, but paper is actually a material that we can recycle.

We can reuse it in our own home for things, but we can also send it off to be recycled into something new, as well, so paper is a really common item that we can recycle.

Next, we have plastic containers.

This one's a plastic milk jug, a plastic water bottle.

These are also items that it's really important to recycle.

These should not go in your trash can.

These can be recycled and reused either around your own home or sent off to a recycling center.

Pizza and a chicken leg.

What do you think about these two?

Are these trash or recycling?

Yes, these two are gonna go in the trash 'cause they're still types of food, and we can't put food in our recycling bin.

This one is an aluminum can.

Looks like a soda can.

Do you think this is trash or recycling?

This one can be recycled, so as long as you rinse out your soda can, these are a great thing to recycle, as well.

Next, we have a broken pencil.

Anything that has multiple materials, you'll notice there's the lead, the pencil, the eraser, the metal piece there.

There's a lot of parts to this, so this cannot be recycled, along with this broken toy.

There might be parts of it that you can reuse or keep, but this also is not something we can recycle.

And lastly, we have this cardboard box.

Do you think we can recycle cardboard?

We can.

Cardboard is another really popular item that we recycle.

You might have shipping boxes or even paper towel rolls.

And instead of throwing out that cardboard, we can recycle it.

So now we have a list of common things that we can recycle.

Some of the most popular are cardboard, aluminum cans, plastic, paper, and sometimes even glass.

So next time that you're thinking about throwing something away or you're finished using it, take a second to think if it might be a material that we can recycle instead.

So now that we know the different materials that we can recycle, I wanna do a fun activity where we can actually recycle something on our own at home.

We're gonna look at the process of recycling paper.

So, this is an activity that with a few different materials you might be able to try out at home, but I'm gonna show you the whole process.

All we're gonna use is some scraps of paper.

So, what I actually have is shredded paper.

I've used a paper shredder to get these really small strips of paper.

But if you didn't have one at home, you could rip up the paper into really, really small pieces.

But the goal is to really get it broken up so that there's a lot of smaller pieces.

We're also gonna use this tool to help us recycle this paper.

This is just a screen.

You can see through it, and there's some really small holes in it.

So this tool helps us to turn these scraps of paper into a new piece of paper that we could use for arts and crafts or drawing or writing.

So if you didn't have one of these, just a mesh piece of plastic or fabric works as well.

So, we are going to use these two things and some water to turn these scraps of paper into a new type of paper.

So, how we start is I've already taken scraps of paper and I've soaked them in water.

So they're gonna get kind of soggy, and you want them to soak for quite a while.

These have been soaking overnight so that they are ready to be blended together and create a new paper.

So in a minute I'm gonna show you how I blended those together.

But once you do that, you're gonna get this liquidy looking substance that is actually just water and paper.

From this we're gonna use our tool to dry it back out and turn it into paper.

It's a pretty cool process and pretty easy to do at home with these simple materials.

So, let me show you how we do it.

(blender whirring) (faucet running) (blender whirring) - [Man] This will make like two cups.

(water dripping) (parchment paper crinkling) - [Briana] I'll take this one out.

(electronic beeping) - [Man] Oh, you're supposed to cover it.

(parchment paper crinkling) - That process looks kind of crazy because I bet that that final product didn't really look like paper.

But the last step is to let it sit out probably overnight because you want it to dry back to its original paper form.

You've probably seen wet paper before, and it's not very easy to color or draw on.

So, because that paper right now is wet, we want it to completely dry out.

And once it's done that, you'll end up with a new piece of paper like this.

You'll notice it doesn't look exactly like it did in the original because this is recycled paper, but it works just as good.

You can still draw, color, paint on these scraps of paper, and you could even rip it into shreds and do it again if you wanted to.

Let me show you how we can write on this.

I'm gonna make a new "Room 9" sign, so I'm gonna write R O O M 9.

So now I have a new "Room 9" sign to hang up on my whiteboard back here, made out of recycled paper.

So for our first recycling activity, we took scraps of paper and watched the whole process of breaking them down and putting them back together to make new recycled paper.

That's kind of similar to what they do when we send off all of our different materials that can be recycled.

They take all of the aluminum together and go through a process to create new usable aluminum.

So, we showed that with paper, but there's one more fun way that we can look at this process of recycling our materials at home, and that is with crayons.

A lot of you guys might have these at home, and you maybe even have some that look kind of like this that are broke or maybe are too short to use.

So we are gonna look at one more way that we can recycle these crayons in our home and take them from broken, mismatched, maybe unusable crayons and make brand new ones that we can use all over again.

First, we're gonna start with our pile of broken, small crayons that are really hard to use, and we are going to sort them into similar colors.

So, I'm gonna set this one aside because this crayon is our black crayon, and I don't see any others that match it, so I'm gonna set that aside there.

Over here I'm gonna make a pile of blue crayons.

Do you see other crayons that are blue?

We have this one.

This crayon is blue.

These two small pieces right here go in our blue category.

This one right here.

And do you see one more blue crayon?

Right here.

Awesome!

Let's look for red and orange crayons now.

Here is our red crayons.

Do you see more red crayons?

This one right here.

Right here we have another red crayon.

There, and one more red crayon right here.

Our last colors are orange and green.

This is our only green crayon, so we're gonna set that over there.

And we have these three little pieces of orange.

Now that we've set these aside into groups sorted by their colors, similar to the way you might sort recycling materials, we're gonna take all the paper off and I'm gonna show you how to make them into brand-new crayons.

Now that we've taken the wrappers off of each of our wax crayons, the next thing we're gonna do is melt them.

Do you remember when we took our paper scraps and we mixed them with water to make this liquidy substance?

We're gonna do something really similar to our crayons.

We're gonna take our wax and we're going to add heat, and that's gonna melt the crayons down so that all of these broken bits are gonna mix together.

So they're gonna turn from a solid to a liquid, and then we're gonna use them to make brand-new usable crayons.

(water bubbling) I took those melted liquid crayons and poured them into this rubber container.

It's actually an ice cube tray, but you could use any shape container as long as it's able to kind of bend a little bit so that we can pop out our new crayons that we made.

You might notice I mixed a lot of colors in here, so instead of just making a one-colored crayon, these have a mix of the different colors.

And we can now take our recycled paper and our recycled crayon (crayon scribbling) and color using our new crayons that we made.

So, today we talked about so many different ways to recycle things at home.

You can upcycle items like bottles and cardboard tubes, or you can practice sorting your recycling and setting aside your plastic, aluminum, paper and cardboard to recycle at the recycle center.

We also looked at fun ways to recycle paper and crayons for a fun art activity.

There are so many more fun things that you can do at home as well.

I hope you enjoy learning about recycling today and can practice some recycling at your home, as well.

Thanks for joining.

(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] Teaching in "Room 9" is made possible with support of Bank of America, Dana Brown Charitable Trust, Emerson, and viewers like you.

(bright upbeat music)