New Christina Soontornvat Chapter Book, Children’s Books about Waste and Garbage, and More!

This wonderfully informative book talks about what goes on with your body’s waste — how you produce it and what happens when it leaves your body. The book also discusses the impact of human waste as well as surprising uses of urine throughout history. This is a great book for kids who are always asking the big questions that no adult can ever answer.

When plastic bags became ubiquitous in Gambia, so did the amount of trash. Suddenly, plastic bags were everywhere, polluting streets and schools and farm land. Isatou Ceesay saw this happening in her neighborhood and decided to do something about all the garbage, and in turn made a powerful impact on her community.

I know that I have a lot of questions about where all of our garbage goes, and Rebecca Donnelly does an excellent job answering all of those niggling thoughts you might have about trash, waste, and what happens after the garbage truck picks it up. Donnelly tells us just how bad our garbage problem is, and what we can do to prevent so much waste from polluting our environment.

In Cateura, Paraguay, a community lives next to an enormous landfill and most jobs involve digging through the trash to find items to recycle. Music teacher Favio Chavez wanted to bring more music to the young people in the community, but he didn’t have instruments. He wondered whether he could build instruments out of recycled materials, and he could! I saw a documentary about this community many years ago and met some of the young musicians who were a part of this “recycled orchestra” — it was a beautiful experience.