It takes two to five years for cigarette butts to decompose in the natural environment, while disposable diapers require 10 to 20 years.
Aluminum cans? 200 to 400 years.
A plastic six pack holder? 450 years.
These statistics may sound trivial, but when children hear this information, they tend to act more responsibly and take better care of the environment.
Children across the country will have a chance to hear how they can be better stewards of the environment while camping at Jellystone Park Camp Resorts.
The Milford, Ohio-based family campground chain is the first RV campground organization in the country to join Leave No Trace, a Boulder, Colo.-based non-profit organization that develops educational programs designed to help children and adults take better care of the environment.
“Our franchisees attended training sessions with Leave No Trace earlier this year, and many of them are now incorporating LNT’s nature based educational programs into their weekend activity schedules,” said Kelly Jones, director of franchise development for Milford, Ohio-based Leisure Systems Inc., which franchises Jellystone Parks.
The Lake Monroe Jellystone Park in Bloomington, Ind., was one of the first RV Campgrounds to implement the program.
“It’s been very popular,” said Cheryl Smith, the park’s general manager, adding that she has scheduled nature activity weekends periodically throughout the summer and fall.
Young children typically participate in age-appropriate discussions about the importance of recycling and taking care of the environment. “That’s when they learn how long it takes for different things to decompose in the natural environment,” Smith said, while classes in environmental ethics are offered to teenagers.
“In the environmental ethics class, teens learn about the erosion that takes place when they take shortcuts on hiking trails or the lasting damage that occurs when they carve their names in trees or leave trash behind,” Smith said, adding, “The whole point of this effort is to raise awareness about things we can do to lessen our negative impact on our natural surroundings.”
Other activities while RV camping at the parks include crafts classes in which children make various crafts out of recycled materials, garden activities, in which children plant various trees and shrubs in the family campground, and short educational videos, which parks can show before their regular nighttime movies.
Dana Gabriel, who co-owns the Jellystone Park in Swansea, S.C., said her park has already had Earth Day activities and plans to offer additional nature activities based on the Leave No Trace curriculum this fall. “We do as much education as we can with the kids,” she said. “We tell them, ‘If you pack it in, pack it out.’ And we see that this helps produce tidier campers. They start to feel a synergy with the park and we’ll even start to see kids out there picking up after each other.”
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