Staff and students at Waters Elementary have been keeping a close watch on their waste lines in recent months.
As part of a bid for a grant from the Environmental Research and Education Foundation, parent Julie Moore has been measuring the school’s lunchroom trash and the weight loss is impressive. Her data shows that just 13 percent of Waters’ lunchroom waste, by weight, winds up in a landfill, with the remainder otherwise recycled or composted.
By contrast, studies conducted by various school districts across the U.S. estimate 30 percent to 50 percent of lunchroom food alone is trashed, not including packaging.
Pete Leki, director of the ecology program at Waters, 4540 N. Campbell Ave., said he was pleased with but not surprised by Moore’s numbers. “It’s so in our blood,” said Leki, who’s been leading the recycling and composting charge at Waters since the 1990s.
Moore, mom to a current seventh-grader and a 2016 Waters grad, concurred. “My oldest daughter started recycling in pre-K,” Moore said. “It’s just part of who she is.”
For such a successful program, the waste diversion process at Waters is uncommonly simple. At the signal that their lunch period is over, students at Waters pick up their food trays and file out of the cafeteria one by one, stopping at a series of sorting stations before they head back to class.
Liquids are poured into a sink, milk cartons and water bottles are placed into a recycling bin, fruit and vegetable scraps go into a garden compost receptacle, plastic utensils and snack bags get tossed into trash, and pretty much everything else winds up in a bin headed to a commercial composting facility.
“It’s completely doable,” Leki said. “Custodians have to be helpful, the principal has to be supportive, but it totally runs on its own.”
The commercial composting aspect, now in its second year, has made the biggest impact, accounting for 48 percent of Waters’ lunchroom waste diversion, according to Moore’s data.
The school is one of 10 within Chicago Public Schools chosen to pilot commercial compost, which includes lunch trays made of compostable material instead of not-even-recyclable styrofoam.
Waters goes through 500-600 of the trays per day, an amount the school’s garden compost system, as comparatively substantial as it is, could in no way handle, Leki said.
Fruit and vegetable scraps, which the school and its volunteers toil mightily to turn into soil for Waters vegetable beds and flower gardens, already amount to between four and five tons a year, he said. “I said, ‘I can not compost 500 trays a day,'” Leki said.
To read the full story, visit https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170619/lincoln-square/waters-elementary-school-compost-recycling-lunchroom-waste.