Go into just about any school and if you poke around you will invariably see industrial sized wheelie bins bulging with black sacks full of mixed rubbish. These are taken off, at a price, and generally buried in a landfill site or incinerated. Nearly all of this is material could be reused, recycled or composted to reduce the school’s impact on the environment.
In schools the largest wasted items are paper towels, paper, cardboard and compostable material. Reusing paper that still has one good clean side is an easy step and much of the rest can be recycled, some of the cardboard, soiled scrap paper and paper towels, can be composted (although you have to be careful not to put paper and card into tumbling systems – certainly not large amounts, but they can go into maturation bays, if well watered). The compostable material can consist of leftover food, trimmings from food preparation, plant material from the grounds, grass cuttings, prunings, hedge clippings etc. Also thanks to government fruit schemes, schools are now producing masses of extra compostable material; the problem is that the average ‘Dalek’ composter is not up to the task of composting school waste efficiently.. Experiences of schools trying to use these have shown that they quickly get filled up and overwhelmed with dense, oozy, sticky fruity waste and attract masses of fruit flies.
Schools that have tried to
compost are often put off by these early experiences and certainly recoil in
horror at the thought of dealing with food wastes such as mashed potato, gravy
and custard, but with the right system and advice, schools can even transform
these unlikely substances into lovely sweet smelling compost.
School Gardens
Of course most schools that are
interested in composting are primarily
interested in developing their gardens. There is a huge surge of
interest in growing food at schools, cooking healthy meals, procuring locally
grown food and teaching children about how their food is produced and where it
comes from. Transition town, climate change and community composting groups are
often involved in helping their local schools in achieving some or all of these
aims.
