Rae Ann: Alien recycling

By Rae Ann, one of the four winners who have seen the #400,000 figure.

My first grader brought home some interesting EPA publications for school children. While I totally support teaching children to recycle and be mindful of wise use of resources I think it's a little off to tell them that 'garbage leads to climate change'.

• epa.gov/epaoswer/osw/k00-001.pdf

And what's with the little flying saucers and aliens (graphics in the publications)? What do they have to do with climate change and garbage?? One publication does open with the statement, "Space creatures might think the idea of reusing containers is an alien concept but here on Earth it's easy to keep an old jar out of the trash and give it new life." (That is a direct quote and the missing comma is their punctuation error.) Well, how does the government know that aliens don't recycle? Is it because they have left a bunch of their stuff here? Hmm? Sounds like a very prejudiced and discriminatory attitude to me. What is that teaching our kids about aliens??




I'm sure some homeschoolers would use this as another reason not to send their kids to public (government) schools, but I use things like this to open up a dialogue about different points of view and how it's good to analyze what you read and are told. It's a good lesson for the kids to learn that while something has some points of value it might also have questionable content.

Also TVA uses methane gas from landfills to produce energy...

• tva.gov/greenpowerswitch/landfill.htm