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We also had Mister Fix Everything whenever we needed him. He became the busiest man in the town!
People soon discovered that they could at the same time reuse most everything and keep children busy!
Kids would decorate old jars and use them as vases. Old tissue papers or straws were used to make
flowers. Kids made also scrap books to study what kind of trees and plants we had around.
or created original postcards:
Teens would gather all their old clothes and give them to smaller kids in order to disguise themselves or
make tents. They would hang tires from the trees for kid to climb on, or they would use old planks to build
tree houses for themselves.
Whatever we had in our junkyard, we sold them in a huge yard sale. The idea was, if you did not want to
keep those things, then maybe others could have the use of it.
Whatever was not bought during the yard sale, we drove it to the Thrift shop and Goodwill, so that poor
people could buy them for very cheap.
Humanitarian Associations were in charge of it so we were sure the things were in good hands.
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To reduce was part of our slogan. That was not enough; now we had to tell people about recycling. All
this asked a lot of efforts from everybody, especially recycling because people tend to put everything in the
trash without an after thought. They would often forget to sort out items, causing the entire recycle bin to
be put in landfills.
The consumption of paper could be reduced dramatically. That was easy to do, but we had to advertise
many times in order that people could get the message. See a forest was necessary for the edition of the
Sunday local newspaper, every week.
This newspaper could well be printed on recycled paper.
Apart from that, there was the problem of us using too much paper because the paper was readily available.
We went to many places over the town, asking people to gather discarded paper and write on the opposite
side whenever they needed scrap paper.
Schools or libraries could well provide a box where people could use and reuse strips of paper to take notes
before recycling this paper.
Somebody made us notice that it was not necessary to print everything since we had now floppy disks,
disks and computers!
Most of the time, you could do presentations on the computer or you could get the book you wanted by the
inter-library loan, or on the Internet. While printing documents, half of the paper used by people could be
cut in half by printing on both sides! Furthermore, documents were less heavy and easier to store.
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