Cafeteria Composting at Whitefish Bay Middle School
As anyone who has ever worked in a school knows, there is a lot – an alarming amount – of waste at lunchtime. The reasons vary. Kids are picky; they may not eat all or anything of what their parents packed them. Fruits and veggies may be traded out for sweeter snacks or tossed altogether. Furthermore, these quick bursts of eating and chatter – some as brief as 20 minutes – often don’t give students enough time to get through the whole apple or bag of baby-cut carrots. The problem of cafeteria waste is troubling on multiple fronts: poor nutrition (and digestion!), wasted edible food, and heavy organics heading to the landfill (and the high disposal costs for the district that come with them).
Very few schools have found a way to tackle these issues. Without an inside champion or a dedicated schoolwide mission, it’s hard to begin, let alone maintain, school composting and recycling programs. It can be tough to get skeptical maintenance staff and administrators on board. School cafeterias – and other large institutions like hospitals – are one of the toughest sectors to penetrate for waste diversion programs. Regulations may present an additional concern.
Whitefish Bay Middle School is bucking the trend thanks to a few committed faculty members and the Green Team student volunteers they coordinate in a new, ambitious initiative to reduce the daily cafeteria trash yield by 50 percent.
The operation is labor intensive, admits Green Team advisor and French teacher Demaris Kenwood, but satisfying. The tidy source-separated receptacles can be deceiving in what they conceal: a few daily hours of patient hand sorting, occasional rinsing, and hauling away. But the results are worth it: a sizable container of food residuals for the school compost bins; two heavy trash bags reduced to a single light one; a clean recycling haul, and even a quantity of unopened food items for donation through a local church community. The Green Team sees value in each of these outcomes.
School counselor and Green Team coadvisor Jeffrey Treul says the students are “amazing when they are given a specific task,” a fact in evidence during my tour as the crew handily shredded a container of brown bags in a few short minutes. And the Green Team is not stopping there. Kenwood would like to get to the point where they don’t see any brown bags at all. Reusable cloth lunch bags are on the horizon. Food residuals are currently disposed of in a system of barrel composters on site at the school and the community garden at the adjacent high school. And Kenwood is looking for opportunities to expand the enterprise. A possible collaboration with the locally managed community garden is a promising start.
Despite the many challenges inherent in institutional waste reductions schemes, Whitefish Bay Middle School is showing all the signs of lasting success: tight organization, effective signage, dedicated people power and outreach, administrative support, and the local infrastructure required to allow for capacity expansion. While some schools will certainly opt for commercial collection to address cafeteria waste problems, the Green Team is proving that a local, community-based solution is viable as well. There may be no getting young people to take more than one bite of that shiny, juicy Gala apple, but at least we can put the remnants into service improving the local soil quality, growing more vegetables, and closing the loop on some of our schools’ perennial waste concerns.
Go white fish bay middle school!