Posted on

‘Waste not, want less’ at CCMS

  • Seventh graders Rachel Chambers and Brandon White dump dried milk cartons into trash bags to be taken in for recycling after Tuesday's lunch period. Press photos by Kate Hayden

  • Students wash out milk cartons after lunch period at the Charles City Middle School.

  • Milk cartons are set out to dry for 24 hours as seventh grade students wash cartons from Tuesday's lunch period.

  • Seventh grader Dylan Shultz dumps used milk cartons into the sink to be washed on Tuesday afternoon.

  • Student Brandon White lays milk cartons out to dry in the seventh grade wing at the Charles City Middle School.

  • A student cleans up at the sink after seventh graders finish washing out milk cartons.

  • Seventh grade students wrote facts about food waste on the windows of the Charles City Middle School, encouraging the grades to think twice about their lunchtime habits.

Students initiate carton recycling within middle school

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com

No one at the Charles City Middle School really knows how much milk students drink for each hot lunch or breakfast they buy. Students have a clue, though. They’ve watched their classmates throw away full milk cartons that haven’t been touched.

“With their meal, a milk comes with it. A lot of kids don’t drink the milk because they don’t like it or they can’t drink it,” seventh grader Lydia Staudt said. “Some of them just dump the whole entire milk out.”

“We asked them, ‘why do you take the milk?’, and they said ‘I don’t like the milk but I have to take it, because it goes with the meal,'” Staudt added.

Staudt, and her 138 seventh-grade classmates, are on course to change an entire middle school’s mind about how milk and food waste should be treated after school meals. It started with a food science unit in November, grew into a lesson on food waste and really picked up speed when students started investigating how much food waste the Charles City Middle School creates in an average day.

“We collected the waste for one whole day, and we collected 109 pounds of food waste,” seventh grade science teacher Julie Holub said. “The kids did the math, and they figured it would be like 25,200 pounds of waste the entire school year … just this building.”

“That number was out of this world, for both me and the students,” Holub added. “We kind of said, OK, we’ve got a part in this, we’re responsible, we need to do something.”

What was creating most of the food waste? Milk cartons. Custodial workers were removing four bags of waste a day from the middle school, and students started brainstorming what they could do to cut things down. Students started writing on the middle school windows how much waste each person was creating to spread the word.

“‘Sixth grade wasted so-and-so amount’, and kids were like, ‘woah, I didn’t know we wasted that much food, we need to cut that down,” student Rachel Chambers said.

Some of Holub’s students called Jendro Sanitation to see if the business would accept cartons for recycling –– it would, but students needed to add their own elbow grease.

“Their only request is (cartons) needed to be cleaned and dried,” Holub said.

Now the class is expanding recycling momentum to the Gatorade bottles, breakfast cereal bowls and juice containers students have throughout the day. They’ve already recycled 19 bags of cartons, and they’ve got the daily cleaning duties down to a science.

Dylan Shultz is one of the students who have taken over daily carton-cleaning during the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade lunch hours. Shultz and his classmates fetch bins from the commons in the middle school. Students are asked to dump leftover milk into one bin and pull the cartons fully open, setting them in a separate bin.

From there, Shultz and other students take the bins into the seventh grade wing, where cartons are hand-washed and set up to dry for 24 hours under hooded vents. It takes five students to clean out the cartons, Shultz said. Now instead of custodians removing four bags of food waste a day from the middle school, they’re only removing two bags of food waste. Students have also started collecting food waste from student breakfast.

“I’m pretty much just trying to keep the world cleaner and cut down on waste,” Shultz said. “Every day, we usually have two bags (of cartons washed).”

“It takes forever for one (carton) to break down, and all this other stuff like styrofoam and packing peanuts, it takes so long to break down. This is one of the ways you could help reuse and reduce,” Shultz said.

There’s still students who throw their cartons in the trash, but minds are starting to change, seventh graders say.

“Some of them don’t even care about it, but I think some of them actually do forget that they have to put it in the bin. It’s easy to get distracted,” Staudt said.

“But you should care about it,” Chambers added.

Staudt, Chambers and classmates Brady Frascht and Chase Crooks interviewed food service staff to create a student news segment on the recycling initiative. They’re working to show the video, which they filmed in the middle school’s media room, during lunchtime to students eating in the commons.

For all four students, who had never made a video in the media room before, the project opened an unexpected interest.

“Mrs. Holub started talking to us about it, saying, ‘you guys should create something, get the word out there,'” Chambers said.

Now, the four are considering what making a weekly student news update would take. Their project is one of many that has sprung out of the food waste initiative, Holub said.

“It has really expanded to food waste, food packaging, food recycling, composting,” Holub said. “I am hoping that the project that these seventh graders have started will lead them to other projects environmentally, projects in eighth grade and into high school.”

“I’m also hoping this gets the sixth graders excited,” Holub added. “Saying, ‘hey, they got to do this last year, I hope we can do it this year.'”

Social Share

LATEST NEWS