Green Machine
The Slightly Gross Truth about Turning Your Food Scraps into Green Energy
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
From Cats Are a Liquid author Rebecca Donnelly, Green Machine is a playful nonfiction picture book celebrating innovation in the energy cycle with food waste composting--featuring illustrations by Christophe Jacques.
Composting is cool!
Celebrate the innovation and science that helps turn your food waste into green energy. See how food scraps are composted, collected, and processed, transforming trash into biogas and electricity. It’s a green machine! It’s a celebration of sustainability and the important role we humans play in the energy cycle. Share it at Earth Day and every day!
*Longlisted for the Nature Generation Green Earth Book Award
Call it Peels on Wheels/ Or a truck full of yuck:/ It's a food scraps collection machine!/ It takes all the waste/ (And some slime, and some muck)/ To a place where the garbage goes green.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Confusing text choices weaken this rhyming introduction to green energy, which follows food "from the farm to the town, to the market, the kitchen, the plate," into the compost pile, and off to the processing plant. In Jacques's retro-mod cartoon illustrations, a green truck ("Call it Peels on Wheels or a truck full of yuck") collects materials from green recycling bins, taking them to a large stinky tank "where trash becomes gas" and large, goggle-eyed microbes peer out from their "slow, murky work." Unfortunately, the text zips by complex ideas, such as anaerobic digestion and biogas, without initial explanation, and the lines seem to favor cadence over clarity ("It's airtight in there, no O2 for these bugs,/ tiny microbes that eat food plus poop"), which may prove perplexing to readers not already in the know. An illustrated diagram at the end clarifies the process, and endnotes make the case for green energy and belatedly explain anaerobic digestion. Ages 4 8.
