Rye Neck’s Daniel Warren Elementary Students Prove Kindergarteners Can Compost!

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One of the questions we frequently get asked is “How will Kindergarteners be able to compost in the lunchroom? Will they really be able to sort their lunch leftovers?”

Our resounding answer is alway “YES!,” and Daniel Warren Elementary School students proved that during their launch of the We Future Cycle program in October 2019.

Following the launch at F.E. Bellows in Rye Neck, which is a grade 3-5 school, We Future Cycle took on teaching the K-2 students at Daniel Warren about composting. Principal Tara Goldberg was very engaged in the launch. She is present during the entire 1 hr lunch period (1/2 hour for grade 2, 1/2hr for Kindergarten, and 1st grade is split up between the 2 lunch periods), which enabled her to optimize the flow of students as they came up to the 2 recycling & composting stations to sort their leftovers. We tried 3 set-ups before we arrived at a system which got the students through the lines most quickly! That is the right way to implement any innovative program like composting; launch with the best plan you have, but be flexible and optimize as time goes on.

The custodial team, led by Tom Tempesta, was enthusiastic about giving input to make the process seamless for them. The aides all jumped in to help; they immediately saw the benefit of recycling and composting and were eager to help the students sort their leftovers properly. Teachers take turns helping kids in the lunchroom – a practice which was common decades ago but is now uncommon in Westchester schools – which is a great way for educators to observe their students in a social environment and also help extend environmental education into their classrooms.

And, the parents, wow! We had parent volunteers from the start, and their dedication was impressive. We Future Cycle monitors the lunchroom stations for 2 weeks during the launch period, but then we leave the program in the hands of a champion at the school. The parents created their own monitoring schedule so they could continue to support the program when We Future Cycle moves on to launch other schools. And while we rely on administrators, aides, and custodians to keep the program operating on a daily basis, We Future Cycle checks in at each school twice per month to make sure everything is humming along smoothly.

The results at Daniel Warren were almost identical to the results at F.E. Bellow. 92% of the lunchroom waste was diverted into composting and recycling:

Liquid: 6lbs (10% of total weight)
Commingled (hard plastics and aluminum for recycling): 10lbs (16%)
Compost (food and paper): 34lbs (56%)
Trays (also will be composted): 6lbs (10%)
Trash: 5lbs (8%)
Total weight: 61lbs

Our only challenge is the many non-recyclable and ever-changing food service items. The Daniel Warren lunchroom has a cooler of water (which is preferable to single-use water bottles), but at one point there were 3 different cups next to the water cooler – one was a plastic recyclable cup, one was a paper compostable cup, and a third was a paper/plastic blend cup which would go in the trash! It is unnecessarily complicated when lunchrooms have an excessive number of single use items that must be sorted at the composting and recycling station, and we try to work with food service to make the packaging more simple.

Thank you to the Rye Neck PTSA for bringing this program to the Rye Neck elementary schools and for their financial and volunteer commitment to this initiative. We look forward to bringing the program to the MS/HS in the near future!

How Much is Actually “a Ton of Garbage”?

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Garbage costs money.  However only very few people actually know how much it costs and what a ton looks like. Very few of us think further then to the curb.

Let’s look at school garbage a little closer. A school with 830 students generated 23 large black bags of garbage every lunch, the total weight of those bags is 398.5 lbs.

This is what 23 bags look like. IMG_0258 Now that we know what about 400 lbs of garbage looks like, lets think about it.

A ton of garbage costs the tax payer around $80.00 to just dump it onto the tipping floor of the Incinerator, the big trash burning facility up in Peekskill. 400 lbs is a fifth of a ton.  So, imagine 5 times the amount you see, or 115 bags of trash. Clearly the $80 per ton does not represent the only cost of garbage. This material has to be put in bags, then brought outside into the dumpster, then loaded by workers into diesel fuel guzzling trucks (about 2.5 miles per gallon of diesel), driven to a transfer station, dumped there, then loaded onto large trucks and driven 50 miles up north to be dumped onto the tipping floor of the incinerator. And then it is burnt into our air. I get dizzy just looking at how often this material needs to be touched and handled for it “to go away”. It takes that much time and effort to “just throw something away”.

We just started the School lunch recycling program in this school and the kids sorted their lunchwaste into liquids, commingled, milk cartons, compost and trash. The results were astounding. unnamed

Out of the previous 398.5 lbs, only 8 lbs were actually non recyclable. That means that 98% of the material is recyclable.  So, “just throwing it away” is not just costing us a lot of money, but in fact, we use tax payer money to burn materials that we could easily sell for a profit. unnamed (2)

This is what 10 lbs of commingled looks like. Some math on the value of commingled. 1 ton of plastic PETE 1 sells from the Yonkers MRF for around $800. (the cost is market driven, oil dependent and is fluctuating). 10 lbs of plastic (to simplify this calculation, it is all the same resin) 2000 lbs of plastics sell for $800.00 10 lbs = $4.00 Milk cartons sell for $450 per ton. 30 lbs = $6.75 IMG_0278And this is what 15 lbs of milk cartons look like, we had two of these bags. And two full 5 gallon buckets with waste liquid weighing 74 lbs. That means we use fossil fuels to truck liquids 50 miles north just to burn them, rather then sending them down the drain? By far the heaviest was the food waste. 180 lbs of wasted food from 800 kids, plus about 50 lbs of untouched never opened food that was placed into the share basket. Clearly, a ton of garbage is a lot, but as you can see, only 2% of it is actually non recyclable.

So, our convenience to “just throw it away” costs us all dearly. Not just as hard cash but also at great environmental expense.

Mount Vernon Students learn about how materials interact with the environment

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What happens to material when it interacts with the environment? What happens once sunlight, wind and rain get a hold of a sandwich and its plastic wrapper?

This was the question that about 100 Mount Vernon 3rd and 4th graders explored in recent presentations. Understanding fundamentally how natural materials (AKA your leftover sandwich or applecore) dissolve or degrade in water. whereas the plastic wrapper will stay as it is……… thus creating a nightmare when it gets into the waterways.

Watching a video about animals ingesting plastics made them understand that this problem can only be solved by all of us.

We explored how every single person can make a difference, no one is too little to make a difference. These kids truly got it.

Sorting into compost and recycling….the norm for these kids

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Watching 5 and 6 year olds casually walking up to the recycling station and sorting their materials correctly into recycling, composting or trash is just so heart warming.

And how quick and normal these movements are now. While chatting with their friends, they empty their left over milk into the bucket to then place the carton into recycling. A quick glance onto their tray and they pick up their plastic cup to also put it into recycling. The snack bag goes into trash, they expertly empty their food scraps into compost and stack their trays.

This behavior is normal to White Plains students, and it diverts 95% of the lunchroom waste into reusable resources. Solving a problem by 95% by teaching a few changes in behavior. That is what it means to create a generation of kids that care.

Nobody is too little to help create change

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Check out these involved K-students. Their job is to make sure that the trays at the recycling station are stacked properly, and ….-boy-….. do they take their job seriously. One is never too small to help create change.

In White Plains schools it is now normal behavior to clean up after lunch by carefully sorting your waste into recycling, non recycling and composting, thus diverting 95% away from garbage. Even the littlest ones know that and do it with care and consideration.

Supporting this behavior by elevating it into a “job”, thus creating a sense of responsibility and reiterating that we are all in the same boat is behind teaching even the littlest ones that their help matters.

Fighting Untouched Food waste

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Most schools in the US are part of the Federal School Lunch Program which regulates how tax payer dollars are spent on student lunches.

Thanks to Michelle Obama, real nutritional guidelines were put in place to assure that commercial food provider do not just use the cheapest of all ingredients to feed our littlest ones to pad their bottom line.

Extensive guidelines regulate the servings of fresh fruit, whole grain carbs, and fresh meat, but -as we all know- we are dealing with kids and some of the best intentions are not going to fly with them. So often enough, there are things they won’t eat despite all the best efforts. 

Before WeFutureCycle got into the White Plains Schools, all those untouched food items would go straight into the garbage. The kids were served, didn’t open them, and off it went into the trash.

Now that we have taught students to separate their left overs into recyclable, compostable and non recyclable, we are also sorting out the untouched food items to repurpose them. Either as seconds for the older grades, or for the afternoon programs as snack or to the nurse for a snack. Anything is better than discarding perfectly untouched food, just because that particular student didn’t want to eat it.

Teaching kids to love our oceans is creating a generation of kids that care

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It is well known that humans protect what they love. Bringing sustainability to a classroom means showing students, as young as Kindergarten that something as vast and big as the ocean needs protecting for all those wonderful creatures that call it home.

Cuddly ocean animals like dolphins are easy to love, but the real fun (and learning) starts with the crazy creatures like anglerfish, corals or jellyfish. Once students realize that life all around them has value and some truly fantastic features, they will begin to see themselves in that system. I just love the groans from them when they learn that starfish eat by inserting their stomach lining into the pried open shell to digest it externally and slurp it up.

When students learn to love the ocean with its creatures, it is easy to teach them not to litter because that stuff would end up in the ocean and hurt those very same animals

For White Plains students, recycling is so normal that it has a lunchroom signal

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If you have ever been in a school lunchroom, unless you are faint hearted, it is a truly invigorating experience. 150 kids in a room, chatting, walking, playing, eating …. a never ending hum of activity. To control such masses, there are elaborate systems in place. Voice levels are measured and given a number code and students learn very quickly how a level 1 voice is being quiet. Students are asked to raise their hands if they need anything during lunch, and there are large posters with hand signals displayed for the kids to review.

Recycling is so normal for White Plains students that there is a hand signal established for it and it is working well. We Future Cycle is very proud to have been able to create a generation of White Plains students that care.

Learning to make the right choices ….a life lesson taught in Ben Turner Elementary School

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We recently launched the WeFutureCycle recycling program in the Ben Turner Elementary school in Mount Vernon. This school has so impressed me with its outstanding lunchroom monitors.

Part of the recycling program is also to teach the kids to only take what they need, which means to not grab a stack of napkins at a time, or a whole handful of ketchup pouches.

Making the right choices is a life lesson and lunch monitor Shantale Hughes is reinforcing that with her (very cute) charges. After her students have gotten their lunch, she helps them open their milk or other things and when she notices them having grabbed more pouches than needed, she collects them, so they do not become untouched garbage.

It takes a village to raise a child and Ms Hughes is clearly a very important part of the Ben Turner village. Thank you for going the extra mile.

Hot Breakfast….anyone? Moving school breakfast back into the lunchroom has many advantages

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Meet Crystal Beattie, a food service lead in a Westchester school district for the past 9 years. She makes cooking for 500 students look easy and she is one of the few schools that offers hot breakfast like those yummy sausage egg and cheese sandwiches in the cafeteria.

While offering breakfast in the lunchroom may have logistical challenges to fit all students into a relatively narrow time window, it comes with the great advantage of being able to offer a hot breakfast menu and also keeping all food and waste in the lunchroom, rather than in the individual classrooms.

Most school districts participate in the National School Lunch Program, established in 1946 under President Truman. This program helps public schools to provide low cost or free lunches to students. About 7.1 million children participated in the NSLP in its first year. Since then, the program has reached millions of children nationwide: 1970: 22.4 million children; 1980: 26.6 million children; 1990: 21.1 million children; 2000: 27.3 million children; 2010: 31.8 million children; and 2016: 30.4 million children.

During the pandemic all schools became eligible for free breakfast and free lunch and meals were then served in the individual classrooms to limit student contacts.

That meant for Food Service providers to heavily rely on commercially available, individually wrapped food items with long shelf life. And that means of course mountains of packaging garbage and food scraps in each of those classrooms. And milk spills in the classrooms, and food scraps on the floor, and an extra garbage run through every classroom by the custodial staff, replacing plastic bags in each classroom….

Can you just see the amount of labor, materials and garbage attached to this issue?

A typical breakfast in the classroom consists of a plastic bag that contains a plastic wrapped starch (bagel, muffin, granola bar or cereal) , fruit juice or milk carton and sometimes a jogurt. Food service staff will fill these items into bags, then knot them, then place them into individual tubs that will be brought up to each classroom. Students usually grab a bag, or open one on the spot to just remove the one item they want to eat and all the rest will go either in the garbage in the classroom, or will make its way down to the kitchen to be discarded there into the garbage.

The untouched food waste is just staggering, here is an example of returned breakfast items on one day from a school with 500 students.

Bringing breakfast back into the lunchroom has many advantages

Hugs to save the world

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” Thank you for teaching us about saving the world”.

This heartwarming sentence, accompanied by a hug came from a 5th grade boy in the Ben Turner Elementary school in Mount Vernon.

This week we rolled out the WeFutureCycle recycling program at this school and taught the students in grade by grade presentation about where the garbage goes and how simple, small changes can make such a difference. Students learned about how garbage from the street makes it into the ocean. An audible collective groan went through students seeing how plastics enter the food chain and ultimately kill animals.

Teaching students that their actions can make a difference, little tiny changes of daily routines add up for positive change. It was heart warming to be hugged by these youngsters for teaching them that they have the power to make change.

It gave me goose bumps

Reducing garbage by 97% at Mount Vernon Steam Academy

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This is what lunch waste of 800 kids can look like, after students learned to sort their waste into recycling, compost and trash.

4 lbs, in a quarter bag instead of the regular 80-100 lbs in 9 bags. A 97% reduction in waste.

Recently, 800 of Mount Vernon’s brightest at the Steam Academy high school learned about how personal choices and small changes can make a big difference. Learning where the garbage actually goes when we are casually throwing it “away” made them realize that we all have -quite literally- skin in the game.

Westchester’s garbage gets burnt in Peekskill, all 2500 tons of it, every day at quite nauseating expense to the tax payer.

And over and over, once garbage is actually sorted, we realize that a whopping 95-97% of that material is actually resource for other packaging if it had just been put into the correct bin, instead of trashing it.

The Steam students, after just one week, are now automatically separating their waste and thus help to divert resources out of the waste stream into recycling.

Every school can do this, as a matter of fact, we as society have the moral and self preserving obligation to teach in our schools that together the most pressing problems can be reduced by 97% if we just taught and reinforced solutions.

Most solutions are actually quite simple, just a change of attitude and a different hand movement.