What a Waste! Rubbish, Recycling and Protecting our Planet; Jess French

DK regularly produce high-quality non-fiction books which make the big topics accessible to little people and this read is no exception. We would like to think of our planet Earth as a beautiful and clean place but the truth is we are surrounded by rubbish and it is all our own fault! We have become a throwaway, single use society and that is creating a huge problem with rubbish.

Jess French’s book is a wonderfully insightful and sad read. Illustrations, diagrams, photos, captions and text boxes highlight the startling reality of the problem with waste. All manner of topics are explored from Pollution to Landfill to Oceans to Space Waste. French leaves no waste stone unturned. The use of statistics is brilliant - they both shock and inform. Did you know that every year we produce enough rubbish to fill a line of lorries going around the world 24 times? Or that 92% of the world’s population are breathing dirty air? How about there are over half a million pieces of rubbish floating in space? Have you heard that a plastic straw takes 200 years to break down? What about the massive ‘Rubbish Island’ that is floating about in the Pacific Ocean and weighs the same as 500 jumbo jets?

So it is clear that there is a huge problem with waste and something must be done. The good news is that there are lots of things that we can do right now to help reduce the problem. People around the world are doing incredible things. A community in Paraguay have made musical instruments out of rubbish and now they play their music to the world. Ocean and beach clean-ups take place regularly around the world. Slowly people are making the change to more eco-friendly items; bamboo toothbrushes, paper straws, beeswax wraps and stores where you can refill your own pots and only buy what you want are all becoming more widely used. Some people are doing an incredible job of reducing the amount of waste they produce and these people lead what is known as Zero Waste Lives. These people produce so little waste over the course of a year that it is actually hard to believe it’s true. Creative people have made businesses out of other people’s trash. These people up-cycle ‘rubbish’ and turn trash into treasure.

What can you do to get involved and help? The easy thing to do is to follow the three R’s - Reduce what you use, Reuse what you must use, Recycle what you can not reuse. This is just the start, Jess French’s book has lots of fabulous and important things you can do. Everything we do can make a difference, no matter how big or small.

An engaging and informative book that highlights the reality of the problem with rubbish. We can clean up now or face the prospect of renaming Earth. If we don’t change our ways we may well be saying welcome to ‘Garbage Planet’ in 2050.

Recommended for 7+.