Recycling garden ideas

Many African Garden ideas are all about making use of things that are normally seen as waste, like manure, old sacks, leaves and mud. They also inlcude lots of recycling and re-use ideas.

There are so many examples of our farmers re-using waste materials that we could include all sort of things on this page. So, we have just focussed on re-using plastic drinks bottles - and there are already 14 uses from one farm! In the main video and Powerpoint, Lorna from Uganda shows how they use bottles on their small rural farm. From solar lights to drip irrigation, the bottles make themselves very useful in all aspects of life. Watch this with your class and why not have a design competition for the most ingenious uses for them. Then send them in to us and we will put the best ones on this page!

In the video on the right, Dennis from Uganda shows how to re-use a plastic drinks bottle and make it into a toy car. All of the materials needed are recycled. Many toys in African countries are made from recycled materials such as bottles, tyres and plastic bags and children will often play outside in the garden with their friends.

If you don’t have access to Vimeo.com to watch videos at school, register for an account on their website at home and then you can download all our videos using the link on the bottom right of each video page.

'About 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion litres of water each year.'

World Wide Fund for Nature