Valley Youth Reinvigorate Our Community

Valley Youth Reinvigorate Our Community

Contributed by Sammy Taylor

What goes around comes around, they say. This year’s Big Lake summer reading program focuses on those returns of rethinking, repurposing, recycling…….  To that end, the kickoff of the program on June 5 had a recycling/reusing theme. Randi Perlman read a book to the kids describing the efforts of one Japanese community to stop burning and dumping their waste by reusing and repurposing all of it. Several winners and participants of the Mid Valley Recycling’s recent contest (to use recycled materials to make new items for use in the Valley) came to demonstrate their ideas. Kids practiced sorting materials so they could be collected by Valley Community for Recycling Solutions (VCRS). Some helped move Worms into their new home so that people could use their castings from their old home for garden fertilizer. Then participants got to make something for themselves out of what could be considered “waste” materials.

Mid Valley Recycling (MVR) – with administrative help from Meadow Lakes Community Development Corporation and financial support from Mat-Su Health Foundation - sponsored a contest open to all young people in our Borough.  Janet Edgar’s first grade class at Tanaina Elementary submitted four applications showing ways to reuse some materials. Ms. Edgar’s class, and other first graders, then toured VCRS to get a better look at one of the steps in Valley recycling. MVR had applicants and winners with projects from using scrap lumber to making 3-d printing string. At the June 5 event Kelsey Keene showed how to turn plastic bottles into “greenhouse” spaces. The Casto kids weren’t there to demonstrate but they had ideas for using plastic bottles for Bird feeders and water filters. The Zatalokin family had several ideas like reusing corrugated cardboard for ornaments, making cookie cutters from cans and animals molded from paper “clay.” Grey Koch had all the materials ready to show other kids how to have their own campfire starters made from waxed boxes and other recycled paper. That’s really useful because VCRS cannot take any waxed boxes even if they are corrugated. Amiah Clements even had a poster to describe her use of all kinds of paper “waste” to make bedding for pets. Hamsters love her idea!  Alaska’s News Source reporters were there to interview kids and library staff.

Mid Valley Recycling members were happy to share all the kids’ ideas and hope some of them are pursued across the Borough