Beyond the Bins: Rethinking How We Teach Kids About Waste

National Recycling Week has just wrapped up. Every year, it encourages us to pay attention to what we throw away. For many families and educators, that means revisiting the basics and helping kids sort their waste into the right bins. But recycling is only one part of a much bigger story.

Sorting waste is a helpful entry point because it is clear and practical. Yellow for recycling, green for organics, red for landfill. Kids can take these actions every day. The risk is that recycling can start to feel like the whole solution when it is really just one small piece. So we need to go beyond the bin.

To help kids understand their impact, they need to know that everything they touch comes from somewhere. The objects we use and throw away are made from materials that were mined, grown, or extracted from the earth. Some of these resources are renewable, but many are not. Even simple conversations about where materials come from can shift kids into a greater awareness of what it takes to create the items they use each day.

Recycling also has limits. Materials degrade over time. Some can be recycled many times, others only once or twice. The process still requires transport, machinery, sorting facilities, and energy. If a load of recycling is contaminated by waste, the whole lot goes to landfill. So while recycling matters, it is not a guarantee, and it is not a fix for overconsumption.

Last year, a group of children I worked with watched the documentary Future Council. In one scene, a group of young people meets with the CEO of Nestlé and calls out the scale of plastic pollution the company creates. It is confronting, and the kids felt it. When we talked about the scene afterward, they had plenty of ideas about how to make the packaging more recyclable. But when I asked them to imagine a world with less packaging in the first place, they were completely stuck. Our throwaway culture runs so deep that many children cannot picture anything beyond the system they have inherited. To them, constant packaging feels normal. It feels fixed.

This is where our guidance matters. Teaching children to use the right bins is a starting point, not the destination. We can help them look upstream and downstream by asking questions:

• How were these materials created?

• How much energy and resources are used to make these things?

• What happens once the bin truck takes them away from our curbs?

You might not have the answers, but asking these questions will plant the seeds for kids to think more deeply about the things they use and throw away.

Then widen the conversation. Ask questions such as:

• How could we avoid using this item in the first place?

• What alternatives existed before single-use packaging?

• What could replace this product with something more sustainable?

National Recycling Week may have ended, but the learning does not. This is the perfect moment to help kids see beyond the bins and understand that sorting waste is just one small part of a much bigger story about materials, resources, and our place in the world. If you're looking for more resources on how to do this, check out my Waste Warrior Starter Kit for families and schools.