sexta-feira, 22 de maio de 2009

Recycling

My husband started a degree in Environment Management (or Gestão Ambiental) earlier this year and ever since the environmental issues have been an increasingly popular topic of discussion at home. I've always been on the greener side of things and my husbans's never really opposed to anything ecological that I've suggested. Now that he's studying the field himself he's constantly learning new facts about the state of the environment and getting small wake-up calls I guess.

Recycling (as done in Finland for instance) is quite difficult over here. I do realise things are different in the bigger cities in Brazil but we live in a small rural town where many things are still unknown or total novelty. There's no organised recycling at all. You can take metal to certain small entrepreneurs that actually pay you for it. However no one recycles glass, paper, plastic or organics. My tactic is to reduce waste as much as I can as well as recycle everything I can inside our own house.

My husband now has to come up with a project that deals with recycling in one way or another. His group decided to renovate a few rooms at the local orphanage (where I also volunteer) and use as much recycled materials as possible. Needless to say the orphanage manager was thrilled at the idea and the group has now started working on it. Our yard looks like a recycling centre as most of the ten group members bring used plastic bottles and other things to be stored at our house... I keep telling myself it's for a good cause and it'll only be for a while :)

Seriously though we had a good time yesterday with the kids cleaning up the bottles and cutting some of them in order to make a prototype of a small seat out of the bottles. I'll post the step-by-step instructions as the first one is done!

4 comentários:

Jael disse...

I just asked in your Finnish blog what your husband is studying and here I got the answer! Very interesting! Here too I wish we could recycle more things than we can now,which is bottles and newspapers mostly, but I have understood that recycling can be very costly too and so it is a question of money ,in most cases. I can't wait to see what is going to happen to all those bottles..;-)

mamãe disse...

Thanks for the comment over here as well! :) Will be posting about the bottles soon again!

Sirokko disse...

Interesting! I'm eager to see the results..

mamãe disse...

Sirokko, posting about them soon...