How many times have you visited a restaurant and watched children giggling at the table while they played with crayons? While we've all seen it, very few of us give any thought where those crayons go after those kids finish with them. After all, restaurants cannot reuse crayons and give them to another child once they have been played with. That leads to a substantial amount of waste every year.

The Crayon Initiative is devoted to rescuing crayons from situations like these where they would otherwise be thrown in the garbage and sent to a landfill. If you're trying to explain this simple cause to your grandparents or someone else in your community, these facts will help you do it effectively.

What Is The Crayon Initiative?

The Crayon Initiative has a mission with two goals: keeping waste out of landfills and helping needy children get the art supplies they need to recover, learn, and grow as individuals. Basically, it's a small action with a major impact. Since 2011, The Crayon Initiative has been helping collect and cut back on the almost 60 million crayons discarded each year, which add up to around a half a million pounds of waste.

Who Does the Initiative Benefit?

Supporting The Crayon Initiative means supporting children's hospitals all over the world. Every single crayon donated to The Crayon Initiative is re-packaged and presented as a donation to children's hospitals and programs, helping to provide needy children with art supplies that would otherwise take away from critical program funding.

So, why do crayons matter to hospital children? In addition to lessening children anxiety, crayon donations also help aid in recovery along with continued growth and development by enabling kids an escape through art and creation. Plus, while you get the pride of helping a wonderful organization, you also get to relish the fact that you've saved perfectly good crayons from going to waste and harming the environment.

Understanding (and Explaining) Crayon Collection

Now that you have the fast facts on what The Crayon Initiative is all about, this crayon collection is easy to get behind. Crayons are received in many ways, including direct donations from manufacturers. However, many industries support the Initiative — including restaurants that provide crayons at the tables. Community and youth groups, along with schools, can also run crayon drives to collect donations of both new and used crayons from the public.

When a person wants to get their community involved, the first step is to start a crayon collection drive of their own. Girl Scout Troops often launch these to earn community service badges, but plenty of community members can get involved — including individuals. If you haven't already, you can learn more about all the ways to get involved, which include:

• Asking your local schools to participate
• Encouraging a Girl Scouts troop to kick-off a collection
• Asking local restaurants to donate used crayons
• Collecting your own crayons and sending them in

If there's a crayon collection going on in your town already, getting your crayons to The Crayon Initiative is even simpler. All you have to do is reach out to someone in charge of crayon donations or go to a local drop-off point.

Encouraging Participation

Say that you have a crayon collection already going on in your community, or you're looking to start one. All you need to do is begin getting people on board by sharing and helping them understand the numbers. Aside from informing them about the 60 million crayons that get tossed every year, tell them that a single box of donated crayons (weighing around 25 pounds) can supply up to 125 children with their own eight-pack to color and create with.

The Crayon Initiative is the definition of small actions making big impacts in the world. If you're interested in learning more about how you can get your community involved, click here.