ENVIRONMENTAL RESILIENCE PHOTO COURTESY OF SOLVE Volunteers prepare to clean up a park in Portland, Oregon. Reimagining Recycling With Show Your Parks Some Love Initiative A By Rukmini Kalamangalam cross Dallas, four recreation centers are locked in a tight race to see who can collect the most plastic recyclables. Everyone’s waiting for competition results with bated breath, from the se-nior center to the youth groups. Drumroll please! Dallas Park in the Woods (PITW) Recreation Center has won the coveted prize — a brand-new, free Sammie’s Buddy Bench to add to its local park. You may never have seen so many people working so hard to collect plastic recycla-bles, but in Dallas, that momentum is continuing strong with NRPA and Niagara Cares’ Show Your Park Some Love grant. Recycling in parks and recre-ation happens all around us — re-cycling cans for special events, re-cycling education programming in summer camps and recycling bins in parks are just some of many ex-amples. Parks are the epicenter of a lot of community-nature interac-tions, and recycling is no different. Park and recreation agency staff are also dedicated recycling enthu-siasts, even when the infrastructure isn’t supportive. In Maine, agency staff took turns manually sorting and hauling office recycling to the nearest recycling center in their off hours. Staff at an agency in South Carolina without an official recy-cling program instituted a clothing recycling program that upcycled old sports uniforms from their out-of-school time recreation activities. Show Your Parks Some Love set out to recognize and reward that passion — and spread the word that recycling can build commu-nity among neighbors and bring people to parks. Building Community Show Your Parks Some Love set out to recognize and reward that passion — and spread the word that recycling can build community among neighbors and bring people to parks. As part of the Love Your Happy Place campaign, NRPA, Ni-agara Cares and other partners have 26 Parks & Recreation | APRIL 2026 | PARKSANDRECREATION.ORG
Parks Recreation Magazine April 2026: Page 26
