“The Green Ninja,” a character created by a climate scientist and his team, provides an entertaining and educational way to help children – and everyone else – grasp the intricacies of climate change and learn what they can personally do to become involved in fighting it. See additional details about the series or head straight to this week’s episode, “Anthropology Apology: Not Your Average Fossil.”
In this episode, two Earthlings from the future are doing some fossil research when they start finding some oddly familiar objects. They aren’t really fossils, just things that did not decompose because they needed to be recycled. Since they were left in a landfill, they just sat there for centuries until one day, these two inquisitive characters found them.
The first “fossil” discovered is a cottage cheese container. Like many other refrigerated food-cups, these are usually made of a couple different types of plastic, many of which can be recycled. Since plastic is a heavily-processed, petroleum-based material, it does not easily break down. If you do not recycle your plastic, it can sit in landfills for a couple hundred years!
What’s next? Fluorescent lights? Smartphones? Um, yes.
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