Green Machine: The Slightly Gross Truth about Turning Your Food Scraps into Green Energy

by Rebecca Donnelly, Christophe Jacques (Illustrator)

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!

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Picture Books, Childrens, Food, Science

32 pages, Hardcover

Published March 17, 2020

Reviews

[Abby Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Green Machine: The Food Energy Cycle by Rebecca Donnelly and illustrated by Christophe Jacques is an informational book about how food waste can be gathered and converted into energy that can be used for a variety of other uses including biogas. In this book, we learn about the process of being able to take in waste and create energy through our ability to recycle. Through the story, we learn how there are trucks, much like garbage trucks we see every day, who pick up food waste from different places and take it to a food processing and recycling plant that then breaks the waste down and converts it into usable energy in the form of biogas.

I would recommend Green Machine: The Food Energy Cycle as a read-aloud book for grades K – 3. This informational book allows the reader to learn about the important recycling capabilities that we have in taking food waste and creating usable energy from what we would have just thrown away. In this book, the illustrations allow for this informational concept to be broken down and explained in a way that is easily understood for children through the illustrations utilized on each page to help explain each step in the recycling and converting process. Furthermore, throughout each page, each step in the process is explained in the most straightforward way possible that ensures that the children reading this book do not become confused by what is going on in the process.

[A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will be a huge hit for schools and families that compost or discuss sustainability. Works better as a prepared read aloud than to one's self, given the slightly unpredictable rhyme scheme.

[Raven Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clever book about recycling and how what goes around, comes around in an illuminating manner.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eewwwwww...but interesting. I think children will like the grossness of the information.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid overview of green energy

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful look at innovation in energy production and composting.

[Lupe Ramirez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Explains how food scraps turn into soil used for another purpose

[Michele Knott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This rhyming text has readers learning about using food waste and turning it into energy. It's a quick look at collecting food waste - into trucks that look very similar to garbage trucks - and then bringing them to a food processing plant so the food can be broken down into biogas which turns into energy!
After reading this I'm wondering if there are any local places that are doing this already!

[Sarah Sims · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great resource for teaching about recycling of organic matter. Also a great resource for teaching about the processes of energy from alternative sources, in this case methane from anaerobic digesters.