The phrase – reduce, reuse and recycle is used often these days, usually it refers to how to be more environmentally friendly, but residents within the Nursing Home recently asked the question “What does this really mean?”. So we decided to do a project to find out a bit more on how to reduce our waste, reuse items we have and how to recycle properly.

We started our project by watching a documentary on ‘How to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle’ and we learnt how important it was to reduce our use of materials and energy, buy products with less packaging and to avoid individually wrapped items. We were really shocked and surprised to hear that one tonne of recycled paper saves 24,000 gallons of water, saves approximately 20 trees from being chopped down and saves enough energy to power the average home for 6 months. When Desmond heard this he went straight to the recycling bin to put his old newspaper into it before we had even finished the activity.

We then completed word searches, art pieces, copy and paste activities and matching the waste to the correct bin activities. We had a great time learning about how to keep our planet healthy and we found a great quote from Annie Leonard (Greenpeace) who said “There is no such thing as ‘Away’, when we throw anything away it must go somewhere”.

This all tied in very well with the fact that in April The Beeches started to use a new Waste Management Company called RiverRidge (as mentioned in a previous post), and it has taken the past few weeks for residents to get totally used to the new bins and what goes into each one.

All of the residents hard work was displayed on the notice board for everyone to see, and as you will see from our photographs below residents had a great time doing this very interesting and educational project.