Whenever I meet someone that works in a school and tell them what I do, almost always their first reaction is, “Oh my gosh, we throw away so much food! You need to come to my school”. Setting up food waste reduction programs in schools does indeed divert a lot of waste and the positive impacts of these initiatives go well beyond just composting.
Addressing food waste in schools delivers the opportunity for students to think critically about a real, tangible issue. At the same time, it forms environmentally-conscious behaviors in our students that they carry back to their families and hopefully will continue throughout their life.
Food waste reduction in schools isn’t just composting. It’s also ensuring that edible food isn’t ending up in any waste stream. I’ve been in dozens of schools, and too much of what ends up in the compost (or worse, trash) was perfectly good to eat. Setting up food sharing and food recovery (outside donation to food banks, etc), is more important than composting, but oftentimes this is overlooked.
With the help of the organization, ReFED, Blue Earth Compost has been partnering with schools around Connecticut to provide in-depth support to public schools. This work has been hugely enriching for me and the Company. There’s few things more rewarding than seeing a child get excited about composting.
One of the main pieces of feedback we get from our school partners is that they’d like more resources for explaining and understanding the “why” and “what” of composting. By this I mean, “why should we care?” and “what happens to the food scraps?”.
So we made a video! And we think it came out pretty darn good, too.
If you’re interested in learning how we might be able to help out at your school, please reach out to Sam@blueearthcompost.com. And in that spirit, please support a fundraiser for a school that is hoping to work with us in the future, East Lyme High School (details below).
Happy Composting from Blue Earth Compost
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