Recycling
Recycling is about living in balance with the Earth, creating harmony through nurturing and valuing what we have, not wasting it. How much junk do you have stashed away awaiting the next council cleanup? With a little lateral thinking it can be given a new lease on life. Gardeners are connected intimately to their environment and can make a positive impact in many ways. By recycling and reusing items in the garden, we can save objects intended for landfill, give them a new purpose and have some fun along the way.
Reuse or recycle?
Reuse (or repurposing) is often confused with recycling, but in some ways they are really quite different. Reuse refers to any activity that lengthens the life of an object. Recycling, on the other hand, is the reprocessing of one thing as the raw material for use in a new product. Examples would be wine corks
becoming flooring, sneakers turned into tennis courts, plastic bottles into clothes and tyres into various rubber products and special applications like soft-fall for children’s playgrounds. Composting is probably the best-known recycling process familiar to gardeners but so much more is possible. From the very practical to the very arty, all manner of things can find new life, reused in the garden setting in ways restricted only by the materials and your imagination.
