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.

Water, the most valuable resource

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Learning what happens when they flush is usually accompanied by extended noises of disgust, but after just a little while, students realize -and agree- that it is very important.

We usually begin by teaching them what it takes in terms of engineering and technology to bring potable water to their kitchen. It opens their mind. Not just to the process but more so to the concept of luxury that it is to have clean drinking water readily available. Learning about flocculation, filtering and disinfection as well as the fact that only 0.3% of all of the world’s water is fresh water available for drinking is quite eye-opening.

During a filtering activity it all comes into focus and students suddenly understand that clean water is our most valuable resource.

White Plains littlest ones are learning how to sort recyclables

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It is one of the highlights for me to go into a preschool class and teach 3y olds that their actions can make a difference. They are so eager to please, eager to learn and are so openly astonished that they have any power whatsoever.

Empowering kids to sort materials into the correct bin and showing them how that makes a difference is the beginning of a lifelong environmental awareness.

What I particularly like is showing them how their food scraps look like after they are composted. With great excitement they are touching and smelling the compost and all declare with sincerity that composting is good. They are off to a great beginning.

Recycling Milk Cartons at White Plains Schools

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Milk Cartons are fully recyclable, made out of high grade paper fiber with a thin coating of PET to waterproof them, they are the perfect container for milk or juice, for that matter most non carbonated beverages.

Produced from renewable resources, fully recyclable, light weight, easy to stack and compostable if need be , so -really- one of the best ways to package, store and serve drinks in a school environment or pretty much anywhere.

Carton recycling was only added in 2016 to the list of recyclable items in Westchester County.

We Future Cycle started its signature recycling program in 2014 and we realized quickly that volume wise, cartons by far outnumbered the plastic or metal packaging coming out of schools. We pushed Westchester County to join all surrounding counties and add milk cartons and juice boxes to their line up of recyclable materials.

We are pleased to save every day bags and bags of this valuable materials from being burnt as garbage, just so we can cut down some more trees to replace that paper.

We are also grateful to the Carton Council for sponsoring us to bring more recycling to a school near you.

Untouched Foods: White Plains School District has a great solution

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One of the most heart breaking problems we see in the schools is the amount of untouched food that gets discarded. A school with about 600 students will see about 180 lbs of food and paper waste. As WeFutureCycle is teaching students to separate their waste into Recycling, Composting and Trash, these 180 lbs are going into compost, making soil, but it also means that these 180 lbs have been cooked, and served but not eaten. 180lbs!

If moms knew just HOW MUCH of their lovingly prepared cut of fruit or veggies, the sandwich or the pasta they sent to school for their child to enjoy as lunch goes straight into compost.

WeFutureCycle is constantly working to recover untouched foods that are coming out of the lunchroom because food is not trash, just because a student did not feel like eaten an item. So, unopened milk or juice cartons, untouched yogurt or applesauce containers, commercially wrapped cheese sticks or baggies with carrots and apples are recovered, and made available for other students as seconds or snack.

George Washington Elementary school in White Plains has invested in a refrigerator and it is a pleasure to watch how students are now aware of the problem and are participating in the “Share Basket”.

This is a wonderful solution to a heartbreaking problem.

White Plains schools is reducing trash one pouch at a time

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WeFutureCycle has been working with the White Plains schools district for many years now and it is such a pleasure to see the positive changes that food service has implemented. All schools have now syrup bottles instead of the dreaded single serve pouches. This comes with the added benefit of practicing table manners for our littlest ones. ” May I have some syrup, please” is now a common phrase which is then accompanied with a life skill lesson to judge how much or little they actually want.

Recently we were also able to introduce salad dressing from bottles rather than pouches.

Reducing trash one pouch at a time, while teaching social and life skill is a win win situation for the environment and the students.

Being Green is in the little details

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We Future Cycle has brought recycling stations to many many schools. The basic idea is that most of the materials that the kids touch during lunch are not trash if they were just put into the correct bin.

Sorting their lunch waste into Compost, Recycling and Trash reduces garbage by a whopping 95% simply through diversion of the materials into reusable streams.

60% of the lunchroom waste is compostable, a combination of compostable trays and food scraps. 25% is excess liquid, 10% is recycling with materials generating revenue for Westchester County and only 5% is non-compostable, non recyclable materials that are then treated as trash and incinerated into our air.

Teaching students to sort is not that difficult, the key is consistency and adult support and buy-in. And the true sign of success is when you see students carefully sort their materials and then carefully set their trays in a neat pile.

That is LIVING the details to be green. Way to go!

Air Pollution, teaching kids how an invisible gas can be a big problem

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When you ask kids about what we breathe , the words “Air” and ” Oxygen” are most often fully interchangeable. And they will know that trees give us “air” and from 2nd grade on, they have heard the word air pollution, but without actually filling it with any meaning. For them, air is all around us, it’s a constant. Air means oxygen to them, so the concept that the CONTENT of air, the ratio of the gases that are part of air are important is beyond their (and -lets face it- most adults) imagination.

For the intrepid reader: our air consists of 78% Nitrogen, 21% and 1% of other gases including CO2 and Argon.

Every time we breathe or burn something we are converting Oxygen into Carbon Dioxide. Thanks to plant respiration, any green leafed plant will convert Carbon Dioxide back into Oxygen. So the question is how much CO2 do we produce, while cutting down trees until that balance is off?

This is all very hard to grasp for kids but teaching them about it and then showing them how a small chemical reaction of mixing vinegar and baking soda together creates an entire balloon full of Carbon Dioxide and for them to watch that it takes only a tiny puff of CO2 from that balloon to snuff out a candle, was very eye opening to them.

Air pollution is something we ALL are contributing to …….. everyday (!), but we all can do plenty of little things to mitigate the results. These kids are going to be part of the generation of kids who care.

Waste free starts with ….everyone of us

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We at Wefuturecycle are proud to work in schools and teach students that their small everyday actions matter and we are particularly happy when we hear them share with us that because of us, they asked mom to change how they bring their lunch to school.

This student is bringing lunch in a lunchbox and is completely waste free every single day.

And kids around him are taking notes too. A trickle of sustainability can create ripples through schools and communities.

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.

Leading by example in White Plains Schools

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We Future Cycle is proud to be the Sustainability Coordinator for the White Plains school district. Teaching students to sort their waste into composting, recycling and trash reduces trash by a whopping 90+% but in order for students to learn and live what they learned, adults around them have to lead by example. White Plains custodial staff is truly stellar about supporting the recycling program and thus modeling every day for the kids what behavior is expected in the lunchroom.

This is a shout out for all of your fabulous custodians that make this program look easy!