The average person throws away four pounds of waste every single day. What if you had to actually live with what you throw away? What if you had to put all of your garbage in your room? Imagine everything you throw away has to go into your room instead of your garbage can. GROSS, right?

(Parents, remember that there have been garbage strikes. It gets ugly quickly.)

What would happen? It would start to smell. And it would get pretty crowded in there, fast.

What would you do? You’d start to learn about composting. Your food – oatmeal from breakfast, applesauce from lunch, and Brussels sprouts from dinner would go into the compost bin in the yard. Not your room. Close call.

What about that plastic water bottle you grabbed at soccer? And the one yesterday. And the day before that. That’s going to stay in your room. For 450 years. It’s getting crowded. Ah, recycling! Whew.

How about if you didn’t use plastic at all? That one water bottle you have can carry anything you want to drink – not just water but milk, Gatorade for soccer, hot chocolate for football games, cold water for the beach. And it keeps it the right temperature, unlike a plastic bottle.

Best – Reuse. Buy it once, use indefinitely (that means a very, very long time).

Next Best – Recycle. We all have things we need to buy that at this point can be recycled.

Hmmm…  all the rest of it goes into landfill, where it cannot break down and will not go away.

Every time you open the cabinet to throw something away or to put it in recycling, ask yourself, “What if I had to keep this in my room?”