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!
