December 31, 2018
By Tony Sjodin
Since Nov. 16, Lexington High School students have expanded options for waste disposal every Friday during lunch.
The LHS Green Team began a new composting program aimed at reducing the trash from students’ lunches. Each public school in the district has its own Green Team, which together form the LPS Green Team, a grassroots organization of parents, staff and students promoting green practices in their schools.
“We’ve started to work with the high school for a year or two now,” Lin Jensen, a member of the LHS Green Team, said. “This project looks very simple—you just put things in a bin—but actually, it’s a lot more complex. We had to involve the custodians, we had to involve the principal, we had to work with the food service people and we had to recruit volunteers. Those are a lot of hours.”
LHS was the last of the Lexington district schools to start composting. Bridge Elementary School began composting in 2006, followed by Hastings, Harrington and Estabrook in 2016. Fiske began composting in 2017, and Bowman, both middle schools and LHS started in 2018.
“A lot of kids were saying, ‘Oh, I remember doing this in elementary school,’ which is really nice since it’s coming full circle,” Tina McBride, another Green Team member, said.
The program currently only runs on Fridays, but its leaders hope to expand.
“If we could have volunteers, we would recycle every day… The second challenge is more communication and education to motivate the kids because we have 2,000 kids, and any population that has even 90% of the people doing the right thing, just 10% of people [throwing] the food into the recycle bin [creates] a lot of contamination that makes our results less successful,” Jensen said.
So far, the program has been successful at reducing trash.
“We have estimated throughout all the schools where we compost and recycle, basically the reduction in waste is 80%, sometimes up to 90%,” Jensen said.
Composting has several benefits, both environmentally and economically.
“We are taking food waste out of the incinerator waste stream. We in Lexington incinerate our waste, but meat and vegetables don’t burn well so it takes more energy to burn our waste and afterwards we still have ash, which ends up going to landfills,” McBride said.
The company Black Earth Compost has been collecting compost from the public schools’ kitchens, and will now pick up compost thrown away by students as well. Many Lexington residents have also ordered Black Earth Compost collection for their own homes.
“The other benefit is to empower the students so [they] know [they] can do something very simple to help save the planet… This is something we can all do for a few seconds a day to make a huge difference,” Jensen said.
Students can sign up to volunteer for ten minutes during lunch to help other students sort their trash. The LHS Chapter of the National Honors Society (NHS) and the school administration both offer community service hours for working with the program.
“It does make such an impact if everybody does it…. people can carry it with them throughout their lives,” Grace Abe, a senior and NHS president, said.
There were worries that students would be apathetic, but the coordinators were impressed with students’ curiosity and willingness to participate.
“That’s my attitude, because who cares about Harvard when there’s no planet?” Jensen said.
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