School Organics

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Hundreds of schools in the Twin Cities area are composting their food scraps. With help from Hennepin County grants and their team in Environmental Services providing technical support, the schools have standardized on colors of bins (green: compost; blue: recycling, and red: trash); signage and education. Click here for composting posters by students. Click here for tips on how to pack litterless lunches for your student.
Carondelet 1st graders learn about composting with Linden Hills Power & Light.

Burrough's Tim Cadotte explains how to compost at schools. Play video

Countryside Elementary, Edina Public Schools - Student-narrated video about how to sort  lunch waste into organics, recycling and trash. See video (.wmv).

A school in Brooklyn Center explains why they compost.

Look at the video the creative Minnehaha Academy kids made:

And Carondelet too!

 

More videos from Countryside, Burroughs, Carondelet and Orono here.

What is organics recycling?

Organics recycling is the recycling of organic waste into compost, a nutrient rich soil. Organic waste includes food scraps and other materials that can be broken down by the natural process of rot. Anything that once was alive is organic, and can be composted. Organic waste will be packaged in special bags, picked up by a truck just like garbage, and taken to a commercial composting facility. Here it will be turned into compost. Organic waste is turned into compost by decomposition. Bacteria and fungi eat the waste turning it into compost. Compost is used in gardens, playing fields, road construction, and landscaping. For information on the science of composting, including educational materials and lesson plans see the links on the right-hand side of the page.

Why is Organics Recycling Important:

It reduces our trash. Waste and what to do with it is a growing problem. We send our waste to the HERC incinerator.

  • Each year in Hennepin County we generate enough waste to fill the Metro Dome 11 times!
  • That’s about seven pounds of trash per person, per day!
  • About 25% of our school’s waste is compostable.

It provides an educational opportunity

Composting provides a wonderful hands-on way to learn about decomposition, and environmental stewardship. Students are actually a part of the composting process. Students can visit a commercail composting site in the Empire township to see the process in action, contact Ken Tritz at 952-946-6999 to set up a tour.

It saves money.

Waste must be moved from the school waste bins, to somewhere. It is either brought to the incinerator, or to the organics composting facility. The cost of moving organic matter to the composting facility is cheaper than the cost of moving trash to the incinerator due to tax incentives and less expensive processing.
  • The cost of hauling organics is $15 per ton vs. about $41.85 per ton for trash. As organics are much heavier than the plastics that are kept out, savings can be substantial.
  • Source Separated Organics (SSO) is exempt from the county solid waste fee of 14.5% and state solid waste tax of 17%. If we recycle a lot of organics, this could save the district money.
  • Organics customers are finding their trash hauler can pick up less frequently, saving labor, fuel, and truck maintenance costs which are built into  pick up fees.


 

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