Plan
- With your Scouters, talk about what can be recycled in your community.
- How is recycling sorted in your community?
- How should you set up your sorting race? How far apart will your bins and garbage cans be?
- What are the rules of your race?
Do
- Each team starts with a pile of garbage/recyclables in front of them (for some things, you can use photos instead)
- On the opposite end of the gym, there should be recycling bins and garbage cans for each team (or buckets to represent them).
- At the start of the race, the first person for each team grabs something from the pile in front of them and runs to place it in the next bin. Then, they run back to their team and high five the next person in line, who takes their turn.
- Keep running until all items have been placed in a bucket. The first team to get all their items to the end wins.
- At the end, go through the items in each bucket and check whether or not it is in the right spot!
Review
- What do you know now that you did not know before?
- How can you encourage others to recycle?
- Why is it important to recycle?
- What in your pile could you re-use without taking it to the recycling depot?
- How is this stuff recycled anyway? Is there a recycling depot in your community that you can visit to learn more?
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Remember to submit your activities on our Scouts for Sustainability Take Action Map
Materials
- Clean litter (pop cans, newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes, plastic bags, old clothing, broken toys, and so on)
- Recycling bins (blue boxes)
- Garbage cans
Keep it Simple
- Create a poster, write a song or perform a skit to help teach people what items go in each bin!
Take it Further
- How much waste do you create at a camp? Learn how much waste you create and how you might be able to reduce that amount!
