Recycling Day: What Happens to the Things We Throw Away

A normal household makes a lot of rubbish, but what happens to the things we throw away?

Old food can be made into compost, while paper and card can be boiled down into a paper porridge and remade into paper or even things like pet beds!

Jars and bottles can be crunched up, melted and made into new containers, or even airport runways. Other rubbish can be burned to heat water, turn it into steam and help make electricity, and some will be buried, where it slowly decomposes. 

Despite all of these great ways that people deal with what we throw away, it still helps hugely for households to repair and reuse as much as they can without throwing things away.

This book has a useful section at the back which suggests the different options families have for their waste: using your own bags at the shops, using refillable bottles instead of throwing away plastic bottles, donating toys to toy shares or swapping toys with a friend, keeping a scrap paper box for drawing and notes, recycling electrical devices, and much more. 

Poppy Faber and Klas Fahlén’s brightly illustrated book shows children the mechanics of what happens in different kinds of recycling and waste control solutions, making connections between the things they may recognise from their everyday lives – different coloured bins, rubbish trucks, etc. – and demystifying what happens to things when we throw them away.