More winter crafts!!!!!

Also, here are some links to more craft ideas:

• snow people from recycled mittens
• tin can punched snow flake ornament
• lots of ideas
• critters out of old tights
• light bulb snowman ornament
• milk jug Christmas crafts

Or just google "winter recycled crafts" and look at the images that pop up- you'll get some great ideas!

Winter Crafts!!!

I don't know about you, but when it get's cold , I feel like it either has to snow, or we should just skip winter entirely and more on to summer.  But since that's a little unreasonable, what better way to keep warm than to stay inside and make crafts!! Out of recycled materials!!! Here's some ideas from the craft classes....

Toilet paper tube penguins:

materials:

• toilet paper tube
• black construction paper
• white paper  (you can use scrap computer paper)
• googly eyes
• scraps of yellow/orange paper

Instructions:

1. Cut a strip of black paper long enough to wrap around the tube, and about an inch taller (so you can give your penguin hair).  Glue it around the tube.
2. Cut out a white oval for the belly and two black teardrop shapes for the wings. Glue them on as seen in the picture.
3. Cut out orange feet and glue them to the bottom of the tube. Cut out an orange diamond and fold it in half for an open beak.  Glue on the beak and googly eyes, and cut the extra black paper on top in a fringe for hair.

K-Cup Penguins:

materials:

• coffee k-cup, painted black (if not already)
• white paint
• orange/yellow cardstock or painted cardboard
• googly eyes
• pipe cleaner
• small bell

Instructions:

1. Paint a white belly on your k-cup as shown in the picture.  Wait for it to dry before continuing.
2. Glue on googly eyes, a yellow triangle for a beak, and yellow feet.
3. If you would like to make your penguin into a bell, make a loop out of half a pipe cleaner and thread on the bell.  Twist the free ends together and push them through the hole in the top of the cup, forming a loop.

Bottle cap stamping:

materials:

• bottle cap
• white paint
• other colors paint
• paper bag or cardboard box

instructions:

1. Cut out a card sized piece of paper bag or card board and fold in half.
2. Dip a bottle cap in the white paint and stamp 3 circles on top or eachother to form a snow man.
3. Add accessories and details with other colors or paint, sequins, glitter, or whatever else you have on hand.

Cork Reindeer:

materials:

• 2 corks of similar color/design
• 2 pipe cleaners
• a red pom pom
• googly eyes

Instructions:

1. Cut one of the pipe cleaners in half to be used for the legs.  Take one piece and fold it in half over the cork that will become the reindeer's body.  Twist the two ends of the pipe cleaner together where they meet against the cork; you should end up with a tight loop around the cork and two separate ends of the pipe cleaner.  Bend up the end of each of the legs to form feet. 
2. Repeat step one with the other half of the pipe cleaner on the opposite end of the same cork.  You should end up with a body with 2 sets of  legs.
3. Twist the whole other pipe cleaner around the other cork (the head) in the same way as with the legs, except instead of forming feet, bend them into an antlerish shape.
4. Glue on the googly eyes and the red pom pom for a nose to the cork with the antlers.
5. Glue the head of reindeer onto the body (you may need hot glue).

Winter Craft Classes

Thanks to everyone who attended the craft class, and to all the CASA kids who were able to participate in our craft night for the CASA program.  We had a lot of fun, and I'm still trying to decide who was cuter- the crafts or the kids!! Here's some pictures....

Recycling symbols explained

Hey everyone!  Here's a good site explaining what materials are included in each of the recycling numbers (1-7) and what they're recycled into:  http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/latest/recycling-symbols-plastics-460321

Where does your recycling go?

First off what exactly is recycling?  There are lots of sophisticated, scientific defintitions out there, but personally, I like the way it's described by http://science.howstuffworks.com: taking something that isn't useful anymore and making it into something new instead of just throwing it away.  This includes repurposing materials, by making your trash into crafts, reusing plastic grocery bags to carry anything and everything, and yardsaling old clothes as well as putting all your paper, plastics, and cans in the big blue bin once a week. 

But as for the actual recycling process...

1.  First, after you put your recylables out on the curb, your trash collection service will come pick them up and sell them to a Materials Recovery Facility.  Here the items are sorted by material through a variety of means.  I have some basics of the MRF process here, but for a better, more detailed description watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CFE5tD1CCI

• heavier plastics, glass, and metals are separated from the lighter paper products by gravity
• metals are separated using strong magnets
• plastics and glass are separated by weight
• glass is sorted by color and broken into pieces, called "cullet"
• plastics are sorted by scanners, which separate them based on type and color
• often in between steps, human workers mechanically separate out materials the machines might have missed

2.  The isolated materials are baled and sold to outside companies who make return them to their base material (plastics are ground into flakes and then pellets, then melted down to form plain plastic) and made into new materials.

3.  Some of these materials are down-cycled, meaning they are remade into weaker or less valuable materials.  For example, paper is made of tree fibers, and after being ground up for recycling, these fibers are shorter, and the resulting recycled paper is weaker and of a lower quality than the original product.  Eventually, the paper reaches a point where it can no longer be recycled and is sent to the landfill.  This is why it's so imported to reduce and reuse before you put something out for recycling.


 4.  To find out more information about what happens to specific materials after beign collected, visit:  http://pages.uoregon.edu/recycle/after_collection.html

http://rexburg.org/index.aspx?NID=449

 

 

 

 

 

 

America Recycles Day!

Next Thursday, November 15th is America Recycles Day!!!!  The event is, in the words of the Loudoun Times-Mirror newspaper magazine, "designed to raise public awareness of the economic, environmental, and public health benefits associated with recycling." 



For more details you can visit americarecyclesday.org.
To find out more about recycling opportunities near us, visit loudoun.gov/recycle or call 703-777-0187.

Halloween Craft Links

Also here are some links to super cute crafts that I've found, but haven't tried, including tin can luminaries, paper mache trick-or-treat bowls, and milk jug skelatons:

http://www.thecraftycrow.net/2010/10/13-recycled-halloween-crafts.html

http://www.thepartyanimal-blog.org/milk-jug-skeleton-fun-recycled-craft-decoration-halloween/

Halloween Crafts

Here are some super cute and easy Halloween crafts out of recycled materials. You need some other craft supplies like glue and pipe cleaners, but the basis of the ideas are that they are made out of stuff we'd normally throw out.  Enjoy!!

Bottle Cap Spiders:

1. Materials:
• cap from any size of water or soda bottle
• paint/ sharpie (any color)
• 2 googlie eyes
• 1-2 pipe cleaners (any color)
• glue (I'd suggest Tacky glue over Elmers, but that's just me)
2. Paint your bottle cap or color it with a Sharpie in whatever color you want your spider to be.  Wait for it to dry completly before continuing.
3. Cut six pieces lengths of pipecleaners about 2 inches long. (Or if you want to be technical, spiders actually have 8 legs...)
4. Glue the legs to the spiders body.  I'd suggest putting glue around in the little groove underneath the threads of the bottle cap and pushing about a half-inch of each leg into this groove so that they'll stay.  You might need to twist the legs around eachother too... get creative! 

5. Once they're in place, bend each up like in the picture at the top, and give your spider "feet".
6.  Glue googlie eyes on the top of the cap, and there you have it; an adorable Halloween spider.

Plastic Bag Ghosts:

 

1. Materials:
• plastic grocery bag
• Tootsie Pop
• Yarn
• Scissors
2. Flatten your plastic bag, and cut out off the handles and seems, leaving to sheets of plastic; one from the bag's front panel, and one from the back.

 

1. Take one of the sheets, fold in half, and lay it over the top of the Tootsie pop.  Scrunch the bag around the stick of the Tootsie pop and tie it in a bow just below the candy part.
2. Draw eyes and a mouth on your ghost. 

Here's the entire, unabridged (I had to shorten the one in the paper a little bit) newspaper article.  It tells a lot about my inspiration for this project, and things you can do to help:

Did you know that according to the EPA, the average American produces about 4.43 pounds of municipal waste (basically a fancy word for trash) every day?  As a high school student this concerns me; I mean our generation is supposed to be the one that’s going to have to clean up the planet.  A mission trip I took this summer made me see how much I waste, when there are people out there who squeeze every drop of usability out of what they have and still just scrape by.  The people of the church we were staying at threw so little away—the whole church had only two bags of trash for the past couple of months, while our group of twenty people had three or four bags after less than a week.   I realized how I don’t think twice about tossing something in the trash, and had no idea where it really went after I put it out on the curb.  When I started researching this more, I was shocked by the numbers, and the consequences this trash has on the environment.  Most of the plastic manufactured (using enormous amounts of valuable energy and oil) is made into single-use items, plastic bags, bottles, packaging, etc., much of which can be recycled, but often is not.  Plastic takes nearly a thousand years to begin to biodegrade, and each person sends 63 pounds of it to the landfill every year.   And they don’t really biodegrade; they just break into smaller and smaller pieces.  There are huge swirling whirlpools, or gyres, of trash in all the major oceans, the items themselves and the chemicals in them harming animals all the way up the food chain to humans. I had been trying to find a topic for my Girl Scout Gold Award project, and after learning all this I knew that I had found my cause.  Many people have no idea about how they can reduce the amount of trash they generate, reuse and repurpose items they already own, and as for recycling, all the little numbers on things might as well be in a different language.  There are so many cool things you can do with “trash”, and every pound diverted from the landfill will lighten the environmental and social weight of our community’s footprint.

Titled Slash the Trash, my project is a town-wide campaign to increase Purcellville’s recycling by 15% and reduce the amount of trash sent to the landfill.  Through community outreach I hope to teach residents of Purcellville and other communities about the consequences of waste and how they can help, especially through recycling.  Although 75% of the municipal waste I mentioned earlier can be recycled, in Purcellville only 35% of this is actually set out for recycling pickup.  San Francisco, which has the highest reported recycling rate in the nation, recycles 72% of its trash, proving that a high recycling rate is possible.  The Slash the Trash campaign is set to last for about 6 months, and at the end of each month the trash and recycling tonnages are calculated (the collection trucks are weighed before dumping their load at either the landfill or a recycling center).  So Purcellville, we have 6 months to increase our recycling rate to 45%.  We now have what’s called single-stream recycling, meaning all your recyclables can go in the same bin; they don’t need to be sorted.  Recyclables include all plastic bottles and containers with a number 1-7 on the bottom (no Styrofoam), metal cans and even aluminum foil, glass, and almost all paper—office paper, catalogues, junk mail, old books.  If you don’t have a blue bin, they’re available for free at the town hall across from the roller rink.  And there are other ways to “slash your trash” and conserve resources.  Before you get to the point where you’re actually throwing something out, whether into the recycling or the garbage, try to cut back on the amount of potential trash you take in.  Bring your own reusable shopping bag or water bottle when you go out instead of relying on single use plastic.  When you pack your lunch opt for metal utensils, Tupperware, and a reusable lunch box rather than disposable everything.  Compost organic waste and shop at the farmer’s market, where not only do you get fresh, yummy food, but you cut back on resources used in transportation and packaging that are unavoidable at the grocery store.  I find packaging one of the most frustrating examples of waste; it seems so pointless.  I mean do we really need everything we buy wrapped in ten million layers of plastic wrapping and boxes?  Buying in bulk helps a little with this, as does shopping second-hand.  And spread the word—encourage your favorite businesses and stores to cut back on their packaging and use of plastic bags (which by the way, there’s a bin at most grocery stores to recycle those).  The trash you do have doesn’t have to be trash though.  Use it to make crafts; google “art from trash” and you’ll find the most amazing things, or find ways to reuse it for other purposes. 

Join the Slash the Trash movement.  Sign the pledge (look for a table for the project at the farmer’s market) saying you’ll do your best to ‘slash your trash’- reduce, reuse, and recycle as much as you can in your own household, and join the Slash the Trash Facebook page online.  Keep your ears open for events that’ll be going on throughout the 6-month period.  There will be craft classes to turn what some may call trash into art, and as soon as I can Slash the Trash will have a blog sharing some of these craft ideas and different tips on how to reuse.  Also send me an email at slashthetrash@verizon.net to learn more and find out about all the latest events.   Even if you don’t get officially involved, still keep the three R’s in mind before you toss something in the trash.  Everything helps, no matter how small.

                Everybody when they’re little wants to save the world.  I know I did anyway.  Now that I’m older, I’ve realized that it’s not going to happen all at once, that we can only make slight changes in our lives to make the world just a tiny bit greener, happier, better.   We can use reusable shopping bags and water bottles instead of plastic single-use ones, we can compost, and we can recycle.  That’s what my project, Slash the Trash, is about; educating people about all the different ways they can reduce, reuse, and recycle to make our town just a little better.  The measureable goal is to increase the town’s recycling rate by 15% and hopefully decrease the amount of trash going to the landfill.  But more than that, I want to build habits and a “green” frame of mind in our community that will last even after my project ends.  So sign the pledge to “Slash your Trash” and join the movement to waste less and live better.  

 

 

This is me at the Tag Sale!

It's here!!!

Hey everybody! Sorry it has taken so long (technical difficulties), but Slash the Trash now officially has a blog! Hopefully you got my email letting you know; thanks to you guys who signed the pledge to "slash your trash" the project is finally underway.  For those of you who are curious about our progress, here's what's been going on....

• We have almost 150 signatures on the pledge sheets promising to "slash their trash".  That's good, but I know we can do better!
• Slash the Trash has been featured in the local Purcellville Gazette newspaper, hopefully raising more awareness about what we're doing.
• In case you haven't seen me, I've had a table set up at the Farmer's Market almost every week and the Purcellville Tag Sale trying to spread the word!
• And we were going to have a table set up at the Safe Halloween event put on by Loudoun  Valley High School with Halloween recycling crafts for the kids; the event has been canceled due to the storm, but I'll try to post the crafts here!!

What you can do...

• Tell your friends and neighbors about Slash the Trash and encourage them to get involved.
• Keep working on reducing your own waste and recycling more in your house; if you need a recycling bin or lid, you can pick one up for free at the town hall.
• Look up Slash the Trash on Facebook and like the page.
• Whatever you're doing, just keep the 3 Rs (reduce, reuse, and recycle) in mind.

Thank you all for your support, without you Slash the Trash would never have been able to get started.  I'll keep you as up to date as I can and share as many of the awesome ideas I can find, so check here as often as you can!

-Slash the Trash