Composting and recycling are easy to do
Composting recipe
Do you have any vegetable peelings, fruit cores, newspaper, leaves, sawdust, and a handful of soil (needed as a microbe starter)? Do you have or can you get plastic trash bags or chicken wire or wood planks or garbage cans or even an old playpen; or can you dig a hole? If you answered "Yes" to both of these questions, then you can make compost. Read Professor Redworm's compost recipe!

You'll know rich compost by using your senses. Compost looks dark and crumbly and feels spongy. Think it might smell kind of bad? Really good compost won't stink at all — it will smell like a forest. Use it as organic fertilizer when planting flowers and vegetables.

For more ideas on how to start composting, visit:
Compost
A Taste of Gardening

Not only is composting a free and easy way to create healthy soil--it is also a great way to recycle. But what about the garbage in your house that cannot be added to a compostbin? Does that mean that those items can't be recycled? No! They just have to be recycled another way.

Recycling
You can start recycling simply by reusing glass and plastic containers. Recycling is very important to a Kid's Re-generation Kid because garbage is a big problem. Landfills in the USA and all over the world are filling rapidly and we are running out of space on our planet for all the garbage that we produce. Recycling and composting regenerates the soil AND the planet.

If you have any questions about recycling, you can visit the Global Recycling Network at www.grn.com

If you really care about NOT spreading garbage around the world, you'll want to become a garbage detective, so you can know how to handle everything that doesn't have to go into the trash truck — from orange rinds to plastic milk jugs. Click onto Become a detective and you'll be the person your parents and teachers will turn to for help in keeping a healthier, cleaner planet!

Submit Your Story
Have you discovered any unique ways to compost and recycle? Did you write a Letter to the Editor at your local newspaper—and get some responses? Tell us about it! We'll select some of the best stories, activities and tips and post them on our site to inspire other kids like you.