Composting at School

The Fifth Grade Science Field Trips at School post on this blog suggests that fifth grade students do a waste audit. If they do that, I wonder if their findings will be similar to the waste audit that I was part of a while ago at my church, namely that the majority of the trash was organics.  Organic waste is made of materials that were once alive: dirty paper, cardboard, coffee grounds and food scraps.

Have you ever wondered whether your school could compost on-site?

My answer to that question is: "Depends."

I love composting!  To me it is a magical process to see yard waste and food scraps turn into rich soil.  It is a good goal to let children experience that, too.

However, in my experience, even healthy compost heaps attract critters. They find those healthy heaps nice and warm! I have had nests of baby mice and baby bunnies in my compost bins.  Worse, I was once chased away by a swarm of angry yellow jackets after I plunged my pitchfork into the nest that they had built in my compost pile.

eco-quartier peter-mcgill

I still love composting.  But I would proceed with caution about doing it at school.

For one, composting takes work.  Unless there is a plan and a succession plan to have a dedicated team every year that will manage the composting, the effort will be a neglected mess.

If a team of people, or the whole school, is enthusiastic about getting a composting system in place, I'd recommend composting only yard waste and some low-risk food scraps: all those coffee grounds from the staff room, dirty tissues, and that's about it. That will result in slow decomposition, but your piles will not likely attract animals that way.

Try vermicomposting. That is composting indoors with worms. 

Vermicomposting would be done more for educational purposes than for waste diversion purposes. 

Your school would need many dozens of bins to process all its compostable waste.  But the educational benefit of a bin or two is worth it!

I have tried a class vermicompost bin a number times, with mixed results. If the contents are too wet, it will smell like... well, trash.  If the food scraps are not covered completely with bedding material each time, the bin will likely attract fruit flies and other little insects. My classroom vermicomposting bin ended up in a small spare room, and a couple of students were in charge of maintaining it there. That went well. Later, the class was pretty amazed at the transformation of their organic waste to beautiful soil!  If your school has an outbuilding that doesn't freeze inside during winter, that can be a good spot for a vermicompost set-up too. 

Try burying compostables.  If you have installed a thickly mulched area as suggested here, a few students could be put in charge of digging a hole through the mulch and into the soil for the purpose of burying a classroom's organic waste.  Again, burying food waste would be exciting for educational purposes only; it is certainly not manageable for the purpose of diverting all the school's organic waste, especially if you have a cafeteria.

If your city or region has a municipal or commercial

 curbside organic waste collection service, that is the way to go for organic waste diversion 

in my opinion.  You could have compost bins for yard waste on-site, but invest in the locally available curbside service for the school's organic waste.  Your school will need to collaborate with and educate the school community on an ongoing basis to make that happen, but this way, the amount of landfill-bound waste will be greatly reduced.  In fact, my church will likely be able to switch from a dumpster to a residential bin after engaging the curbside compost service.

For more detailed information as you consider composting at school, click here.