We want to give the best life to our kids. Toys, books, bags, trendiest clothes, cycles, gadgets – we don’t want them to feel deprived. We don’t hesitate once to provide them with materials that will feed their imagination – crayons, chart paper, computer paper, water colours, glitters, glue…

In our well meaning intentions, we sometimes forget that we may also be encouraging the kids to generate immense amount of waste. Paper once scribbled may go into the dustbin in a jiffy, those plastic toys will stop interesting them in a matter of days, bottles of poster colours are emptied in a couple of afternoon activities and tossed in the bin. Why, don’t we keep telling them to clear clutter from their desks, keep the rooms clean. Well, this is a good habit to instill but what about the bigger consequences of first creating all that mess and then dumping it all in the dustbin in the name of clearing clutter? Are we actually clearing
the cutter or just adding more and more mess to our eco-system…?

It’s high time we encouraged our kids to start reusing, recycling, upcycling, buying less and hence generating less waste. Before I delve deeper into this topic, let’s have a quick look at this somewhat lesser known and even less understood term – *upcycle. Upcycling is similar to recycling in that we take something (that we may otherwise throw away) and revamp it into a new form for continued use. Read more about it in my previous post…

Reusing, upcycling – all this can be a lot of fun and deeply satisfying. I will share a few experiences from my effort to reuse old stuff and ingrain this spirit of creating ‘treasure from trash’ in my 3+ daughter – Pari. These are some small things that are now becoming habit forming with us.

1. Revamp old clothes (and no, you don’t need to know sewing for this!)
Instead of buying more and more clothes for the preschoolers and growing children, we can give them a project to revamp their old clothes. It may be as simple as doing some block printing using some fabric colours.

In the picture, Pari (my daughter) and I revamped her old white T Shirt last year by printing ladyfinger cross sections in the Indian flag colours – saffron and green. She was thrilled to bits to see the new look of her T Shirt and infact she wore it for the Independance Day celebrations in her playschool the next day. ater on she went on to colour her father’s old T Shirt as well which he would proudly wear outside during his weekend activities.

2. Good old slate and chalk
For practising aphabets, numbers etc, our older generation relied on the cheap and simple slate and chalk/cacium carbonate pencils.
That practise has somewhat diwndled these days. Come to think of it, a simpe slate can save tons of paper being wasted everyday for these writing practise sessions with the kids.

3. Pamphlets, hand-outs, greeting cards – more useful that you ever thought!
For Pari’s nursery craft projects like “collage of my favourite things”, or “summer/winter/spring collage”, we generally need picture cuttings. I have realized that instead of wasting magazines by cutting out pics for those projects, its a nice idea to save the pamphlets, ad insertions, greeting cards, hand outs in the malls etc. They aways come in handy when looking for pictures of food, veggies, fruits, places, buildings, toys, dresses, festivals etc.

4. Make puzzle out of card board box!
Cut out a not-so-complicated cartoon/picture from any magazine or newspaper. Glue it onto the cardboard. With a very sharp utility knife, you can cut this into pieces to make a homemade puzzle.

5. Old waste materials as tools for painting.
We don’t have to buy expensive paint brushes every now and then for the preschoolers. Old tooth brushes, straws, icecream sticks, tooth picks, feathers – all these make for great brushes/tools to make some unique art work and paintings.

I will keep adding to this list as and when I come up with newer ideas. Do share from your experience in the comments section.

I wanted to post some ideas on how to encourage our kids to reduce waste by reusing, recycling and *upcycling* and then realized ‘upcycling’ is a relatively lesser known and even less understood term and hence we just may confuse it with ‘reusing’. So, here’s a quick post on what ‘upcycling’ actually means, how’s it different from ‘recycling’ and ‘reusing’.

Upcycling is similar to recycling in that we take something (that’s otherwise a waste) and revamp/remodel it into a new form for continued use. However the main difference is that in the case of upcycling we generally do not alter its form back into its components for reuse. Also, in recycing – the quality of the original material may degrade (recycled plastic) but in upcycle, we actually retain the quality of the original product and infact sometimes enhance it.

For example, we have an old glass bottle.

In recycling, the recycling center sorts the glass from other recyclable material and sends them out to be recycled, where the glass would most likely be melted down to make a new bottle/jar along with all the other glass containers that are no longer in use. In upcycling we would clean the glass bottle, beautify it with some glass colours etc and reuse it as a flower vase!

Upcycling is different from simply ‘reusing’ the product for same purpose – for example, reusing the glass bottle to store oil or juice.
Reusing it as a flower vase means upcycling. The glass bottle got a new lease of life when we revamped it to use as flower vase.

This term (‘upcycling’) was originally coined by the authors McDonaugh and Braugart and is being extended to revamping anything for a different use/purpose. Anything that was intended to end up in the landfill.

Upcycling reduces substantial amount of waste and industrial production. Besides being a boon to environment, its wallet friendly as well as we buy less. I find it much more satisfying than just ‘creating’ anything new because in upcycling, we are reinventing and repurposing an old item that may have outlasted its purpose or usability. When we repurpose it, we are giving it a new life and meaning…