The Recycling Nazis

This week Jack and Will are attending a "Lizards, Frogs & Snakes, Oh My!" camp at our local nature center.  As you might suspect, the nature center is Nazi-like when it comes to a big proponent of the 3 Rs of recycling: reduce, reuse, & recycle.  One of the main points they indoctrinate teach the children is to use reusable plastic containers for their snacks and lunches instead of the earth-destroying, polar bear killing, rain-forest deforesting, ozone layer depleting disposable plastic baggies.

Now before I come off sounding too anti-environmental, I want to say that I do appreciate their efforts in educating our children about being good stewards of the earth.  At home, we teach the boys about taking care of the environment...hey! we even have a compost pile, but we are a lit-tle weak on the recycling part, despite Jack's constant encouragement (although there is the constant moaning from him about having to haul the recycling bin to the curb every Thursday.  This recycling is not for the faint of heart!).  In fact, today he was explaining to me how some empty boxes we have in the garage could be made into some wonderful furniture for our deck.  And the mental image of pieced-together cardboard furniture sitting out on Brent's beautiful Ipe deck had me chuckingly (mentally, of course)!

Anyway.

This is not our first camp at ye ol' nature center.  Oh No!  Mama here is wise to their ways; I know their disdain for the earth-destroying, polar bear killing, rain-forest deforesting, ozone layer depleting disposable baggies.  So on Monday, I packed all of his snack and lunch in environmentally friendly, polar bear loving tupperware containers. 

 (after camp, of course!)

And my sympathies went out to all of the unsuspecting, first time mommies who loaded up Junior's lunch bag with those terrible sandwich and snack baggies.  Rookie mistake!  

When I picked Jack up from camp on Monday, he told me that his counselor had congratulated him on all of his reusable containers.  Jack said, "Keep up the good work, Mom!"  Yay me.

Today, Jack said that they are having a recycling contest and he got 15 points for having no disposable containers!  "I'll be in the top ten at the end of the week!  I'll get a prize!"  

Prize?  Did someone say prize?!?!  What is this prize, of which you speak?  Cause if they are giving away gift certificates for a free hot stone massage, I'm all over this recycling thing!  

But I'm highly suspicious that the prize is a $10 discount coupon for the video:  "Humans, Why They Are Baaaadddddd for the Earth!!!"  Hmmmm....maybe I should "throw" the contest and sneak a non-organic whole milk plastic container in his lunch bag tomorrow.

But then again, he really does love polar bears....