Milly Zantow Changed the World You’ve probably never heard of her She wasn’t a superstar or a princess She didn’t invent lifesaving medicines or the internet or candy that fizzes inside your mouth But she did create something you probably see every day And because of her there’s a lot less plastic garbage in the world Milly was born on an Oklahoma farm in 1923 almost a hundred years ago There were seven kids in her family living with their parents in a small house with only four rooms As soon as Milly was old enough to talk she went to live with her grandmother who lived in her own little house on the farm There as a small child Milly started working Milly’s grandmother kept a loom in the kitchen the
warmest room in the house and she would weave rugs likely from strips of old clothing while Milly sat on a little stool tending the warp strings so they didn’t snag While they worked together Milly’s grandma sang to her or told her stories At that time people reused everything they could because they had to There was no recycling as it exists now but people found new uses for all sorts of things at home
Recycling Now and Then These days most of us take recycling for granted We sort our garbage recycling and compost at home unless we keep the compost for our own lawns and gardens We know the recycled stuff will be made into new objects of all kinds Your old homework might become your next birthday card An empty olive oil bottle can be recycled into an olive jar or beautiful tiles for the kitchen Recycled glass is sometimes mixed into road-paving materials Aluminum from a soft drink can might be made into new aluminum cans aluminum foil or building materials Plastics will find new life as drainage pipes carpeting or recycled fabrics your cozy fleece jacket might be made from pop bottles RECYCLED BRIDGE
There is a bridge in Scotland made of recycled plastic bottles and plastic household waste It’s strong enough to carry forty-four tons of pedestrians cars and trucks Not only that it won’t ever rust or need to be painted And when it finally has to be removed many years from now it can simply be can you guess recycled It seems obvious that we should reuse our metals glass and plastics by recycling them after all these are non renewable materials That means their supply is limited They come out of the earth metal from ore glass from sand and plastics from oil and once we use up what was created long ago maybe even when our planet was formed it will be gone We should recycle paper too even though it’s a renewable resource It is most often made from trees but it takes a long time to grow trees plus a lot of energy electricity gasoline and human labor to harvest and transport them then process them in the paper mill Even better paper is easy to recycle It may be hard to imagine that just thirty or forty years ago probably around the time your parents were born most people just tossed everything in the trash pop cans juice bottles newspapers plastic milk jugs and cat food cans When the garbage trucks came around they squished everything together into a big stinky pile and drove to a big
