ISLAND VOICES
Teaching children to recycle

Tom Levy is communications director at Kama'aina Kids.

When I was a teenager in San Francisco in the late 1960s, my family and some neighbors put together a homegrown recycling program. We diligently collected glass, aluminum and tin cans and separated them into fiberboard barrels to be trucked to local industrial recyclers.

Decades later, when municipal curbside recycling programs were launched throughout the Bay Area, the habit came easy to us.

However, that habit faltered when I moved to Hawai'i in 1998 and found recycling required substantial effort. I had expected the Islands to be awash with community recycling sites and curbside recycling bins. After all, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Hawai'i has finite space for rubbish.

Granted, more than 80 schools across O'ahu have city-provided recycling bins, and there's a smattering of community recycling sites. But to raise a generation of recyclers, it has to hit home. So it's fortuitous that Mayor Jeremy Harris has made plans for O'ahu to start curbside recycling in July.

In celebration of Earth Day in April, Kama'aina Kids, one of Hawai'i's largest nonprofit child-care providers, will launch a recycling and litter pickup project to augment the city's recycling efforts.

Throughout April, our preschool keiki will bring glass and aluminum from home to deposit in bins at their schools. On Earth Day itself, April 22, our school-age keiki will pick up litter at sites near their schools.

Our young recyclers will collect donations from relatives and neighbors to honor their participation in the program. The money will help pay for scholarships, educational equipment and supplies at Kama'aina Kids programs. Ultimately, we'd like to see recycling come as naturally to keiki as weekend lu'au with the 'ohana.

Here's what kids should know about recycling:

• It reduces the volume of solid waste that must be burned or buried. Those materials we recycle don't need to be dumped or burned in the H-Power plant.
• It saves energy and money. Making new aluminum cans from old ones costs less and requires less electricity than mining and refining new aluminum.
• It reduces damage to the 'aina. If we build picnic tables of plastic lumber made from recycled soda bottles instead of wood, fewer trees must be cut.

Make recycling part of your family culture and take the burden off the landfills.