Jerri Sumner, age 7, of Eastpoint, Georgia, for her question:

What do they mean by recycling?

When you pedal a bike, the wheels cycle around. We call it a bicycle because it has two wheels to go cycling. Not all cycles are wheels. But they all move around and come back to where they started. A bus makes a cycle around town. It recycles around when it makes the same trip again and again. Nowadays we talk about recycling trash. We collect empty bottles and send them back to be remodeled and made into more batches of bottles.

Everybody wants to clean up pollution, so that our air and water will be fresh and clean again. We can do it    if everybody lends a helping hand. Many big changes must be made to purify all the air and water. This will take time and a lot of hard, heavy work. And it will cost a lot of money. But there is another kind of pollution that wastes money and other useful things. What's more, we can start fighting it today. Nobody is too young to lend a helping hand. Maybe you have heard of litter pollution. You see this mess in our parks and beside our roads. It is those trashy bits of paper, those empty cans and bottles that careless people just chuck away outdoors.

Naturally this litters the scenery. But we also know that this trash pollution is very wasteful, because a lot of that stuff can be remodeled and used again. This is recycling. Nowadays, almost every neighborhood has a recycling program. We can help by collecting trash and litter. Then we sort the bottles, cans and papers and take our precious loot to the right recycling station.

There the helpers send the used bottles back to a glass factory. They are smashed and melted down. The mixture is molded to make more bottles, just as good as new. Various factories fill them with the things that go in bottles. Then they are recycled back to market for another round of useful duties.

Paper is made mostly from chomped wood and trees must be cut down to make every new batch. The used paper we collect is sent back to a paper mill and chomped into woody pulp. The mixture is dried and rolled into clean flat pages to be used again. This recycled paper saves a lot of our precious trees.

We learned about recycling from Mother Nature herself. She must provide food, air and water for all the plants and animals. But she only has so much of this and that. Nothing can be wasted, nothing can be used and thrown away. Nature solves these big problems by recycling used items to be used again. The plants remodel and refresh the stale air. The clouds help to purify the water and spread it around. Nature has hundreds of these recycling programs. They are busy day and night  ¬everywhere in the whole world.