Are you stuck on recycling activities for kids to incorporate in lesson planning? Teaching kids to recycle in your classroom doesn’t have to be a major feat! There are so many ways you can encourage sustainability in and outside the classroom, and for many kids, school will be the one place they learn the most about reducing, reusing, and recycling.
The teachers on our Teach Starter team also know teachers have a lot on their plates (ahem, understatement of the year!?), so we’ve put together some quick and easy ways to encourage recycling in the classroom. And yes … we mean seriously easy!
Whether you’re prepping for Earth Day or National Recycling Week or just looking to make the classroom more sustainable and help students better understand what it means to be kind to the planet, these ideas to get kids to recycle are all suited for kindergarten through sixth grade. Plus, we found some recycling rewards programs where teachers can get free stuff, so you can sign up!
Recycling Activities for Kids to Add to Your Classroom
1. Set Up a Classroom Recycling Centre
It sounds pretty simple, right? But often it’s the simplest things that really work! Just setting up labelled bins where kids can put trash, compost, and items to recycle can be enough to encourage kids to recycle paper, plastic, and more!
Just pop to your local department or discount store, purchase three different coloured bins and download our handy labels for garbage cans — we love that the various posters include examples of what is considered trash, compost or recyclable material so that it provides students with a guide.
2. Set Up a Worm Farm
Combine your desire to get your students to help you protect the planet with ecology lessons, and set up an earthworm farm in the classroom to compost food waste.
Worm farms are pretty inexpensive to create — an old fish tank filled with soil and some moist shredded newspaper (and worms of course!) is all you really need to get started. Hit your local thrift shops or secondhand stores to find cheap tanks. This also makes a great science project for students to put together (we have the worm farm instructions that they can use) as well as opportunities for maths lessons — students could calculate the costs of building the farm and profits for ‘selling’ their compost — and even opportunities to talk about healthy eating.
Worms like compostable materials like fruits and veggies, after all; not junk food!
3. Reward Your Recycling Heroes
Celebrating student success goes a long way toward empowering kids, and it’s one of the fun things about being a teacher. Noticing your little recyclers for their achievements is a great way to make them feel like they’re really making a difference.
Create a classroom recycling goal that’s achievable — maybe it’s 2 full recycling bins a month or maybe even more (it depends on the size of your bin!) — and when the class hits the goal, celebrate your students’ contribution to the earth by rewarding each student with an Environment Hero Award to take home proudly.
Note: You might want to let your janitor know the plan so they don’t empty a half-full bin when your students are still working on hitting the full mark!
4. Assign Personal Whiteboard Erasers
We all have those rogue socks that were eaten by the dryer, and chances are your students do too. Send a note home to parents that if they have them, their kids can bring those spare socks without any mates into school to use as their personal whiteboard eraser when participating in individual and group activities involving small whiteboards.
This teaches kids not just about reusing items but also helps build a mindset of recycling items at home — not just at school!
5. Make Seed Paper
Another fun way to encourage kids to recycle paper? Show them how to turn it into something! Seed paper can be a great addition to an ecology lesson — all it takes is paper (which you have plenty of), a blender, water, a wooden spoon, a microfiber towel or piece of flannel, spatula, strainer and flower seeds.
How to make seed paper:
- Have students tear up a pile of paper into small scraps.
- Fill the blender about halfway with the torn-up paper.
- Pour warm water over the torn-up paper until you hit the top line.
- Pulse until the water and paper mixture is a pulpy mess — you want to keep going until there are no paper flakes remaining.
- Add a teaspoon of flower seeds and stir (DO NOT BLEND as it will destroy the seeds).
- Lay out your towel or piece of flannel on a flat surface.
- Strain out any water from the seed mixture.
- Pour it out onto the towel, and use the spatula to spread it out as thinly as possible.
- Allow the mixture to dry out. You will likely have to flip after one side is dry to make sure the other side is dry as well.
Once it’s ready, the seed paper can be used by students for writing letters that can be planted!
6. Recycle Caps for Game Pieces or Art
This is another creative way to encourage recycling — ask each student to bring in a used bottle lid to be their individual game piece when playing games in the classroom. They can use water bottle lids, Gatorade lids and even the tops from those little spouts on orange juice cartons. Use markers or other craft supplies to decorate and personalise the lid. When it is time to play a game in the classroom, students can use their individual game pieces, reminding them that their recycling efforts are worth it again and again.
7. Keep the Bags!
Have you ever wondered just how much Australian schools contribute to the waste crisis? According to Clean Up Australia’s 2022 campaign, it was found that the majority of plastic litter collected (79%) was discarded on school grounds. Fight that head-on!
When your students have zipper sandwich bags, encourage them to recycle the disposable bags by planning classroom fun that they can get in on! The bags can be washed out in the classroom and used for heaps of things, from growing bean sprouts to showing the water cycle in action!
Here’s just one fun activity that our science teacher team suggests:
Draw and label the water cycle on a clean sandwich bag. Fill it with some water, add two drops of blue food colouring, and tape it to a window with strong tape (duct tape, preferably). Throughout the day, condensation will form, and your students can see the water cycle in action.
8. Brainstorm Ways to Recycle
Incorporate recycling into your writing lessons! Kids can brainstorm ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle items and write about them. When they dream it, they have more buy-in and will be more committed to the recycling cause.
9. Swap Out Plastic Straws
Do an exSTRAWdinary thing for the environment, and switch to biodegradable or paper straws for your craft activities. Do your students bring juice boxes or pouches from home with plastic straws already attached? Encourage students to recycle them with a ‘buy-back’ program in the classroom. For example, for every 10 straws they save from their lunch for the recycling bin, students can select a small prize from your classroom prize box.
10. Challenge Students to Upcycle at Home
Save money on all those classroom supplies you buy yourself while also encouraging your students to commit to reusing items by drafting a list of classroom needs they can fill with items at home. Of course, you don’t simply want students scrounging around the house without talking to parents or guardians first.
Include the list in your classroom newsletter sent home to parents and guardians, and explain that having students bring items in from home is part of your in-class sustainability lessons.
Some items that can be reused in the classroom include:
- Books students have already read that could be added to your classroom library
- Furniture
- Old technology, such as telephones, typewriters,and record players
- Used board games and puzzles
- Toys
- Cushions (again, washed!)
- Arts and craft paper and cardboard for modelling and crafts
- Takeaway containers, old paper ream boxes, baby food jars and chip cans to store equipment.
Free Recycling Rewards Programs for Teachers
Join TerraCycle Fundraising Programs
Want to get rewarded for your classroom recycling efforts? Why not!
By signing your school up for TerraCycle fundraising programs, you can earn cash-back donations for hard-to-recycle rubbish you send in. While funding new classroom supplies, you can inspire the next generation of recyclers.
Participate in the Envirobank Scheme
Instead of throwing out plastic bottles and cans, set up a recycling station in the classroom and receive 10c for each bottle donated to Envirobank! You can get your students excited to recycle by setting goals and rewards for each level reached, such as purchasing a new classroom game with the money earned through recycling.
Receive Free School Recycling Bins
Kickstart your school recycling efforts with some swanky (and free!) bins. By joining the Wave of Change program offered by Containers for Change, you can request to receive dedicated bins and free collection of the containers you’ve recycled. Jump on the opportunity and get your class hyped about recycling.
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