Grade 4 students at Holy Spirit Elementary are cleaning up the world, one piece of organic waste at a time.
A new program implemented at the school at the end of January has “significantly decreased” Holy Spirit’s total waste, from using full-sized garbage cans to waste paper baskets that are “barely full.”
“We put food waste in organics now, like orange peels and banana peels,” explained Cale Schneider, 10-year-old student at Holy Spirit.
“If we didn’t recycle there would be a lot of greenhouse gases and that wouldn’t be healthy.”
Organic waste recycling is part of the Green Club, an initiative the school has been running for a number of years. Before the organic program, the Grade 6 class was running a recyclable program and the Grade 3/4 classes were running refundables.
“We had the Green Club already for a number of years, we were just missing that one piece,” said Celine Orieux, Grade 4 teacher.
When the program was first introduced, the Grade 4 students were in charge of manning the new green bin in the school gym during lunch hour, explaining to the kindergarten to Grade 6 students how to properly dispose of their organics.
“There used to be a crowd of around us now there are only three kids per person,” said Daelyn Lyttle, nine-year-old student at Holy Spirit.
“We used to throw everything in the garbage, it made a very big difference.”
The Grade 4 students said the objects that could go into the organic waste that surprised them were muffin/cupcake wrappers, Popsicle sticks, tissues, pizza boxes and pencil shavings.
“This is important, so we don’t have so much in the landfill,” Oliver Vaux, nine-year-old student at Holy Spirit explained.
Very few things go into the actual wastebasket now but the students listed off a couple of items that cannot be recycled including broken pencils, plastic wrappers with tinfoil, yogurt tops, mixed paper – for example plastic on one side – bags lined with foil, and sticky notes.
“Things don’t really decompose in the landfill so this is really good for the Earth,” said Teagan Watt, 10-year-old student from Holy Spirit.
The organic waste is given to a company that worm composts it into soil – a fact the students learned after a presentation from Green Calgary.
“We want to be more sustainable,” Orieux said.
“And hopefully this carries over at home and becomes normal for them.”
