KEEP YOUR FAMILY ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY

Involve your kids in making your family more environmentally-friendly. Here are some ways even preschoolers can help save the planet.

Recycle

Get your toddler to help you put out the weekly paper collection and plastic recycling bin. Get them to check the plastics by asking, “Does it have a triangle on its bottom?” Encourage them to remind you to take reusable bags when you go to the supermarket and help them rethink what you buy and the packaging it comes in. Go shopping at your local second-hand or op shop, kids can get a lot more for their money and learn about recycling at the same time.

Be energy efficient

Make one child your ‘light monitor’, responsible for switching off lights when you leave a room. Not only will you be conserving energy, you can also save around $50 a year. Help your child think of other ways they can save power. Talk about the water cycle and come up with ways to conserve and reuse water, like watering plants. Get them to think about where water goes. When you’re washing the car together, do it on the grass, not the road and explain that drains are for rain only because you don’t want dirty water and detergent ending up in the sea. Teach your child how to find out which way the wind is blowing by watching the washing on the clothesline or the leaves on trees.

Walk

Even if you only leave the car at home and walk to kindly or the shops once a week, you’ll be cutting your carbon footprint. And you’ll be getting some exercise too!

Be a tidy Kiwi

Don’t wait for Keep New Zealand Beautiful Clean Up Week in September or other organized clean ups – encourage your preschooler to pick up rubbish whenever you’re out walking. Does a household rubbish audit to find out how much rubbish you put out each week - the average New Zealander produces 2.5kg of waste every day! Get your children to think about where their rubbish goes and how they can reduce it by recycling, reusing or composting.

Composting

Get your children involved in turning your kitchen food scraps and garden waste into nature’s fertilizer by making compost. Make a Bookish compost bucket – get two buckets that fit inside each other and put holes in the top one. Put Bookish Mix in the top and add your fruit and verge waste. Put a lid on it and keep it in the kitchen. Your littlies will love watching it decompose into liquid which can then be used as fertilizer. Bookish mix is available from stockiest listed on the site. You can also put scraps into a compost heap or in a black polythene rubbish sack, tied at the top with holes punctured in it. Leave under a bush and after six months it will be ready to put back onto the garden. If it starts to smell, just sprinkle over a handful of lime. Did you know that your compost can get hot enough to boil an egg!

Make a worm farm

Using worms to eat all your food scraps is also a great way for children to learn about organic recycling as well as how to care for animals. Children love watching the worms turn scraps into castings which are good for your soil and can be added to your garden and pot plants. Worm tea, the liquid waste they produce, is also a great fertilizer. Your children might want to bottle it and sell it! Before you start digging up the earthworms in your garden, you need a special type of worm and a dark, moist worm bin for your worm farm. Feed your worms food scraps, verge and fruit peelings, tea and coffee bags, coffee grounds, eggshells and vacuum cleaner dust. Don’t give them onions, citrus peelings, peppers, meat or spicy foods.