Schools Spring into Waste Reduction!

It’s springtime! The snow is melting to reveal fresh vegetation budding up but also tangles of litter along the roadsides. On average, each person in Carleton County produces about 2 kg of solid waste each day. All the garbage piling up definitely creates problems in our society and environment. And schools certainly play their part in waste generation. Just think of all the paper waste alone! Canadian schools produce a total of about 80 000 tonnes of solid waste per week, according to estimates from Waste Reduction Week in Canada.

Students from five elementary schools are taking action to reduce the amount of waste going to the landfill, as part of Falls Brook Centre’s Sustainable School Program. Participating students include classes and student councils from Centreville, Bath, Bristol, Debec and Southern Carleton Elementary Schools.

One of the biggest initiatives is paper recycling. With all the homework, hand-outs, and memos, paper is one of the biggest categories of waste produced in schools. Thanks to a donation from the Valley Solid Waste Commission, these schools all have classroom paper recycling bins. These bright blue bins make recycling more convenient, safe and tidy but are only receptacles. The real change for schools that want to take action isn’t the bins but the participation of students, teachers and administration. This means implementing the 4 Rs in order: Rethink, Reduce, Re-Use then Recycle.

To help students understand the rationale to the 4 R order and some of the environmental factors that can inform their decisions, Falls Brook Centre facilitated interactive workshops with classes. Students examined what makes up their garbage, where it goes, how our society and environment is affected and why we create solid waste in the first place. They got to explore a few different strategies to waste reduction: a re-usable and bio-degrable mug made from corn products, a toy chicken made from old plastic bags in South Africa and a vermicomposter filling with busy red-wriggler worms that turn food scraps into compost. The red wrigglers were definitely a huge hit!

As a grade 5 class from Southern Carleton wrote, "We learned so many things from your presentation. For example, we now know what goes in a compost. Some of us thought you could only put food scraps in a compost. We were wrong, but now we know! We were amazed by how much garbage Canadians collect each year."

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