Government making it happen: recycling rubbish

Teacher note

Worksheet in development

Governments put different emphases on policies – influenced by their and electors known priorities, size, resources and other considerations.

Consider how Sakai City makes its rubbish recycling happen, and how it deals with school lunch box dilemmas. Consider how New Zealand communities deal with the same issues.

Rubbish is a core local government service in Kansai and New Zealand.

Start with the waste from food, and its packaging. There are choices, bury some or all of it in landfills, separate it, reuse it one way or another – turn it into energy.

Share experts and community opinion and attitudes about what to do.

Sakai “Clean”, the city rubbish and recycling service, tells local elementary school children and international visitors their main focus is on reduction of rubbish, and promotes the four Rs

• Refuse (e.g. don’t accept plastic bags from the supermarket if you don’t need them)
• Reduce (e.g. fill up your notebook, don’t waste pages)
• Reuse
• Recycle

Sakai’s educational message is that resources will disappear if people don’t return them.

Local government can influence how well the four Rs work, including by deposits policies for bottles, and arrange for households to separate their rubbish into categories for recycling.

In Sakai children go in groups to collect magazines and newspapers – but not containers - from houses, take them back to the recycle centre, and receive money for their group activities.

Economic growth means more rubbish.

Leadership in waste management benefits society by producing less rubbish, produces more energy, exports.

There are various ways to educate people to understand challenges we face with food and with rubbish, health and environment, and what governments can and cannot do.

This chapter of the Kansai through Kiwi eyes DVD offers a number of illustrative examples of systems of government – making things happen - in the New Zealand and Kansai settings, including,

• Educate about the four Rs in rubbish
• Turning rubbish into energy for community use
• Using incentives to reduce and reuse rubbish

Possible key understandings that you may wish students in your class to explore are outlined below:

Government decisions affect people’s lives.

Society can be influenced to varying degrees of significance by government decisions.

People seek to influence the government decision-making process in order to advance what they consider beneficial to society.

Worksheets can be used to explore the central concept (i.e., systems of government) of this chapter.

You may have further lines of inquiry for the classroom.

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