At Bookmans, we understand how important it is to take care of our planet by recycling. We recycle merchandise every hour, of every day over our trade counters and know that every bit of product we tuck away on our bright orange shelves may be that much more waste NOT in a landfill. We live and breathe by the saying “one man's trash is another man's treasure” because every single day you can hear the ooo’s and ahhh’s of our customers as they find a book, record, video game or DVD that they had previously thought was harder to find than a unicorn or two-headed dragon.

All of these reasons and more keep us excited about recycling, which is why we were thrilled to host a Recycled Creature Craft in celebration of our Earth Month. Our employees, friends, family and customers collected paper towel tubes, toilet paper tubes and wrapping paper tubes for over three months to ensure we had enough supplies to turn those tubes into recycled creatures. Employees were even bringing in tubes right up until 10 minutes before the craft started! We all made a serious commitment to be aware of what we were throwing away and stopped to remind ourselves that this simple piece of common trash was going to be the foundation of a child’s creative masterpiece.

Bookmans prepared a vast array of supplies to bring the tubes to life, some of our favorites included: neon colored feathers, shiny jewels, gobs of paint, dried cinnamon sticks, leaves, string, pom poms, fabric and much more! The kids got to work right away and carefully chose the sizes of tubes they would need to develop the characters they had envisioned. Bookmans staff gave mom and dad a hand by helping to paint the tubes (which was the longest part of the whole process).

We then allowed them to dry but while we waited, we received a special visit from the Recyclesaurus. As part of the Keep Phoenix Beautiful organization, the Recycleasurus teaches kids about the joys and importance of recycling. The children took photos with the earth friendly dino, sword fought with tubes with him and the Recyclesaurus walked our sales floor to put a smile on all of our customer’s faces. He especially liked our Earth Month display, which he could not stop browsing through.

We said farewell to him and continued our crafting party. We had a few dinosaurs made (I think we can thank the Recyclesaurus for that!), a couple of dogs, and even some doll furniture! Once we glued the finishing touches and googeley eyes, the creatures really came to life. We gave the completed creatures the royal treatment by snapping their photo in our Recycled Creature Photo Booth which was a replica of a fantastical medieval castle made completely out of paper towel tubes that I personally put a lot of time and hard work into. The kids loved the castle and we all discussed which tower we’d like to live in if we could shrink ourselves.

 

Everyone who joined us had an awesome time learning how easy and how much fun recycling can be and hopefully we can go beyond cardboard tubes and maybe expand to cereal boxes, paper shreds, plastic bottles and so much more. The possibilities are really endless and everyone who came out to Bookmans on Saturday got to see it first-hand. Thanks to the Recyclesaurus and make sure to visit Bookmans at the Earth Day Festival on April 22nd at Cesar Chavez Plaza so that we may all continue our message of being Earth friendly!