Note: As of March 15, the composting initiative is suspended until further notice to minimize the spread of COVID-19.

With fewer than 50 school days left, CPS will only start the compost project in the three pilot schools, CPS science coordinator Mike Szydlowski said. Next year, the CPS science department will stagger every CPS school’s start by around a week, so district members have time to help, and eventually all district schools will be part of the system.

In order to determine some baseline data, representatives from the CPS Science and Nutrition Services will be at RBHS to weigh trash as it leaves the building March 12 and 13, before composting begins. Then, the same representatives and others from the City of Columbia will be back March 16 to gauge a first-day success number, RBHS science department chair Melissa Wessel said. She has helped organize the process on a school-wide level.

Wessel said she thinks RBHS will be the hardest building to manage because “we’re big, and we eat everywhere.” She said the elementary and middle schools will be easier because students eat at the same time and place and leave the cafeteria together. There will be four collections of bins in the cafeteria and one in each hallway, equaling around 10 stations in all.

“When [composting] came up to be a thing that some of the schools were doing, we knew Rock Bridge would be hard,” Wessel said. “But we also knew that there were people in the building pretty passionate about it. And so we wanted to be one of the first schools because we figured ours was gonna be the hardest one. And if we’re one of the first schools, that’s going to make everything easier for the other buildings.”

CPS’s massive landfill contributions inspire plan

The origins of the composting project stem from a $97,000 grant the City of Columbia earned in order to pay drivers to truck compost from schools. The grant’s purpose was to divert waste from the city’s fast-filling landfill, Szydlowski said. Szydlowski largely deals with the administrative aspect and works with schools to educate and develop plans for them.

“In only another year or two, from what I understand, [the landfill] is filled up,” Szydlowski said. “And that’s a big deal. It costs millions of dollars to make another landfill, and we’re gonna have to do that very soon.”

Because of the landfill problem, the Office of Sustainability from the City of Columbia approached the CPS science department to begin the composting plan. Szydlowski called the school district “one of the largest trash producers” in the city. During a one-day trash audit in 2019, Gentry Middle School produced almost 500 pounds of trash.

“It’s staggering. I was shocked at the numbers,” Szydlowski said. “Anything that would ever go in your mouth or part of what’s going in your mouth could now go in compost. So they are expecting about 80% of the Columbia Public Schools trash could, if we do it right, go into our compost and not go into landfill.”

Size of district causes complications

The new trash, recycling and compost bins will sit on carts with wheels, making it easy for students to move them around to dumpsters and compost trucks outside of school. The City of Columbia will provide funding for them as well as other materials and dumpsters.

The city, however, will not pay for the drivers to truck compost from schools as previously outlined in the grant because of CPS’s sheer size, which caused administration to seek help outside of the city. Szydlowski said the city barely had enough staff to get their regular routes done, so they were worried they would not be able to manage the pickups. Moreover, the level of compost the whole of CPS would bring in is too much for the city’s facility, Szydlowski said. This caused the project to push back its original Feb. 6 date to March 16, so CPS could work to find alternatives.

“There’s a lot of big federal regulations that govern how a landfill and compost area works,” Szydlowski said. “In Columbia, our compost area apparently is right next to the landfill, which means if anything mixes, they get fined a lot of money … and they were very worried that the amount of compost that we were going to be producing was going to overwhelm the space they had. So they decided they couldn’t do it, which really is what set us back many months. We were trying to figure out who could do it.”[/vc_column_inner][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner]Eventually, CPS hired BlueBird Composting, a private company in Fulton, Missouri to truck the compost to their facility, where they turn it into soil. Anything in the district that costs over $15,000 must be “put out for bid,” as Szydlowksi said. The financial department sent out requests for bids from possible companies, and BlueBird was the best option for CPS, as it is local and more convenient than other farther companies.

BlueBird and CPS formed a contract for the rest of the year for the three pilot schools. The company has experience with residential compost but has never serviced a large school system, so they are charging less than normal, as this program is a pilot for them as well.

Students get involved with the process

In order to successfully complete a project of this caliber, administration looked to other large school districts with a composting system for direction. The Shawnee Mission school district in Kansas implemented a similar composting program in 2008, of which CPS science department members observed to gain inspiration, Wessel said. The district also uses the three-bin system and involves student leaders to help others identify where to put their garbage.

“The start was not too bad,” Shawnee Mission East High School custodian Dale Clark said. “With high school students, it took a little time to get them used to separating the food items.”

Wessel has organized student ambassadors for the purpose of avoiding contamination. She said administration must think carefully about how to compel students to compost and recycle correctly. For the first two weeks, students volunteers will stand at the trash, recycling and composting bins and direct others. Non-biodegradable materials such as plastic, metal and styrofoam cannot be put in compost bins and items such as aluminum-lined chip bags and greasy pizza boxes will contaminate recycling. Junior Madison Moller plans to take shifts during her second hour AUT.

“Those cardboard pizza boxes, I mean, so many [people] use those, and there are so many of those that can be composted, but instead have to be thrown away right now—because of the grease, they can’t be recycled,” Moller said. “Now that we have the new compost bins, we’ll be able to reuse that in a better way, so that they aren’t sent to the landfill.”

During and after the beginning two weeks, Wessel will need people to wheel the bins to the dumpsters, whether they be students, parents, faculty or entire classes. They must be available second hour in order to volunteer during both lunch periods.

“We’re going to need volunteers for a while. But eventually, we shouldn’t need volunteers, maybe a volunteer to wheel the can, but that should really be it,” Wessel said. “Eventually we should have signage that tells you what to put where, and hopefully we train each other well enough that it’s a habit.”[/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][penci_text_block block_title_align=”style-title-left”]If you want to help RBHS students compost, sign up to be a waste diversion volunteer at this link http://bit.ly/3cqIgrW or scan the QR code.[/penci_text_block][vc_empty_space height=”50px”]How do you think composting will affect RBHS? Let us know in the comments below.