Where Does Our Rubbish Go?

Every Tuesday morning, Rohan watched the garbage truck from his bedroom window. It stopped, a big arm lifted the bin, tipped everything in with a crash, and off it went down the street.

"Where does it all go?" he asked his mom at breakfast.

"Good question," said Mom. "Shall we find out?"

That Saturday, they visited the town recycling center on an open day. A woman in a hard hat and a bright yellow vest met the visitors at the gate. Her name was Mrs. Ito, and she was in charge of the whole place.

"Most rubbish from the gray bins goes to a landfill," she explained. "That's a huge hole in the ground where rubbish is buried. Some of it stays there for a very, very long time. Plastic bags can take hundreds of years to break down."

"Hundreds of years?" said Rohan. "That's longer than my great-great-grandma has been alive!"

"Much longer," said Mrs. Ito. "That's why we try to recycle. Things from your recycling bin come here."

She led them to a huge building with moving belts that rumbled and clattered. Bottles, cans, newspapers and boxes went zooming past. Machines with magnets pulled out steel cans. Workers and machines sorted paper, cardboard and plastic into big piles.

"What happens to them next?" asked Rohan.

"They are squashed into big blocks called bales," said Mrs. Ito, "and sent to factories, where they are made into new things. Old paper becomes new paper. Plastic bottles can become fleece jackets, or new bottles. And aluminum cans can be melted and made into new cans again and again, as many times as you like."

Rohan stared at a mountain of squashed cans. "So my lemonade can could come back as a new can?"

"It might already have been a can a dozen times," said Mrs. Ito with a smile.

At the end of the tour, she gave every child a small bag of soil. "And this is for your food scraps," she said. "Apple cores, banana peels, vegetable peelings. If you make a compost bin, tiny creatures like worms will turn them into rich soil for growing plants."

At home, Rohan and his mom made a worm bin from an old storage box with holes in the lid. They filled it with damp shredded newspaper and soil, and bought a box of red worms from the garden shop.

Every day, Rohan fed them. Apple cores, carrot tops, tea leaves. The worms wriggled down and ate it all. Slowly, the scraps turned into dark, crumbly soil.

By the end of the summer, Rohan had enough to fill a whole flower pot. He planted some sunflower seeds in it, and they shot up taller than he was.

The next Tuesday, he waved at the garbage truck from the window. "Our bin is getting smaller every week," he told his mom proudly. "Most of our rubbish isn't rubbish anymore. It's cans, and paper, and worm food."

⭐ The End ⭐