By the end of September, RBHS, along with Hickman High School and Battle High School, will add compost bins to their trash disposal systems. Partnering with the City of Columbia and the Mid-Missouri Solid Waste Management District (MMSWMD), Columbia Public Schools’ (CPS) high schools will label bins separating compost from recycling and trash. 

Waste audits conducted by the MMSWMD at CPS determined more than 50 percent of the solid waste generated at school cafeterias can be composted. The audits also showed that many materials that could be recycled or composted were thrown in the trash bin.

“According to the grant application, all schools would eventually receive recycling and compost bins for their cafeteria,” Kreitner said. “Some schools will start much earlier than others, as we are only waiting on CPS Custodial Services to purchase the recycling and compost bins.”

Before the effort was finalized, CPS sent a team to a district in Kansas to observe and learn from their experiences with school compost bins. The goal of the trip was to mimic the successes of the project and avoid repeating its failures. 

Once the bins and labels are placed, it will be the responsibility of select RBHS staff and students to help implement the initiative. Specifically, Dr. Andrew Kinslow, Honors Biology, AP Environmental Science and Contemporary Issues teacher, and Melissa Wessel, Honors Anatomy and Physiology and Honors Biology teacher will play lead roles in teaching the school how to use the new bins. 

“The trash bins that we have around are going to remain the same, but the new recycle bins are going to become triple bins,” Kinslow said. “The photos on the bins will say ‘This goes to landfill.’ ‘This is mixed plastics and metals that are cleaned.’ ‘Here’s fiber from paper and then compost, which would be any organic food waste’.”

The entire project and its enforcement will be volunteer based, requiring faculty and students to make the transition run smoothly. Kinslow wants to be a part of the program and step into a leadership role as well.

“When Kory Kaufman retired, he was a faculty leader for recycling and environmental coalition,” Kinslow said, “I’m just trying to fill his shoes.”

For Wessel, the reason for becoming a key member of the plan runs closer to home. Growing up in a rural community, Wessel is familiar with not having the resources to remove trash and the idea of making smart decisions about how and where to throw waste. As a child, her family had to take both the trash and recycling to centers far from her house, rather than having it picked up from her lawn. Wessel, however, believes this lifestyle has made her more passionate and careful in handling garbage, and she teaches her thought process to her children. 

“At my house, we’ve been really good about composting and recycling,” Wessel said. “We make choices at the store, so that when we come home we don’t have as much waste, like when we chose apples we don’t go for the ones that come in packaged in the plastic bag. We use our own little bags, and we pick the apples from the pile, so we’re being thoughtful about which things come to our house.”

Kinslow and Wessel will work with the Environmental Coalition, a student-run branch of Rock Bridge Reaches Out (RBRO), to educate the RBHS community. As leader of environmental coalition, junior Kierra Pilot believes it is her job to introduce new ideas to the school to make RBHS a healthier place, and the bins are a way to achieve her goal.

“Last year during my What If project I talked about how Germany has separate bins and how it aids them in being number one in recycling,” Pilot said. “Then Mrs.Wessel talked about how we will start implementing it in our school, and that’s how I got involved.”

While the bins have not yet been added, many students and staff, such as Pilot, Wessel and Kinslow agree that the change will help reduce RBHS’s production of landfill waste, while remaining simple for the school to acclimate. 

“It’s more efficient to a certain degree, as even the trays from the cafeteria are compostable,” Kinslow said. “You can go with your plate and be like ‘Ok, this is clean plastic. It goes here. I have some extra papers. They go here, and now, this is the compost’.”

How can you help reduce the amount of trash you need to throw away? Let us know in the comments below.