Helping future generations tackle waste

By Alex Dalziel 

Docklands resident Mika Grechyk has published a new book that teaches children about responsible rubbish disposal. 

With over 25 years of consulting experience for a number of large multinational corporations, Ms Grechyk has taken to writing children’s books in her spare time. 

The busy businesswoman spends most of her time between Australia and Europe, where she consults and runs workshops for Fortune 500 companies like Ernst and Young and Coca Cola. She was also once the vice president of the Snowy Mountains Chamber of Commerce.

Her business saw her spend 23 years in Europe before coming back and finding a home in Docklands, which was a purposeful decision. 

“I enjoyed the amazing cosmopolitan life Docklands had to offer, living in high-rises, enjoying the views,” she said.

“Docklands was the only match to the [European] lifestyle I had grown accustomed to, it is so pleasing to the eye, and everywhere you look there is nothing that is old or rundown.” 

Mika is in the works of writing a children’s book called, What happens to all our rubbish? Wondered the very curious red bin, which was inspired by her grandson’s childlike curiosity of rubbish.

The book follows three rubbish bins as they look at how our waste is managed after disposal.

The beginning of the book is dedicated to her grandson, who developed a passion for his three rubbish bins at 16 months old. Mika said that her grandson would help his parents bring the bins out and wait patiently for the garbage truck to arrive. 

At home her grandson would play with his toy garbage truck and bins constantly. Mika would drive him around the suburbs following the garbage trucks just to see them stop and pick up rubbish. 

“We would ad lib and tell each other stories, and my grandson kept on saying ‘can you tell me that story about the bins’,” she said.

“We would grow the story, so the next week or two weeks later it would be different. He would then wheel the bins over so they could hear the story, and would say ‘the red one is the brave one and the green one is the scared one’… so that’s how it came about.”

Mika started talking to other parents and discovered similar rubbish obsessions among other kids. She took this as her starting point, deciding to make three rubbish bins: general, recycling and green; the protagonists of her story. 

She hopes to teach young children about what happens to rubbish once it is taken away by the garbage trucks, and improve awareness about responsible disposal practices among kids. 

“When I was younger there was no segregation of rubbish, things just went into one bin and maybe there was the green bin but now there is, children know now and it’s part of their life,” Mika said.

“Rubbish is part of a young child’s life and this book teaches children how to dispose of it responsibly and learn of its benefits.”

As a Docklander, Mika endorses the local Love Our Streets (LOS3008) group and wrote her book partly as a supplement to the street cleaning campaign which will begin on September 21.

“Compared to other countries, of which I have been to many, Australia is a clean country and a proud country. I love this new initiative of cleaning our streets and would love to tap into this as a citizen,” Mika said.

What happens to our rubbish? Wondered the curious red bin is printed to be one hundred percent recyclable, plastic free and carbon neutral. 

BooksGrowUs.com