Vision

We were so grateful to be part of this experience! Through LSF Sustainable Future Schools Youth Forum 2022, learners in the In School Enhanced Learning Program (ISELP) at our school learned about the diverse avenues of taking action in climate change education. After evaluating the needs of our school, we decided on our action: composting to reduce food waste within our school, as we noticed a lot of food was going into the garbage that really shouldn’t be. So, we spent the grant money on a FoodCycler for our school. With this new technology in our school, we chose to focus on 4 different types of actions: Educate & Inform, Get Your Hands Dirty, Fund Raising, Persuade Others To…all under the guise of Goal 12 “Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”.

Action

Educate & Inform: ISELP students held presentations within our class and the rest of the school on the importance of composting to reduce food waste, as well as analyzed the technology and shared its positive impacts. We learned from reading the manual HOW the Vortech™ Grinding System speeds up the natural decomposition process and dries and grinds food waste into a healthy by-product, and made connections to curriculum lessons in science and technology education. Here are the areas our project reached:

Get Your Hands Dirty: each nutrition break, our ISELP student leaders went around to students in the class to collect food scraps, then ran the cycler at night, and transferred the fertilizer to our garden beds which are new and expanding. We also transferred some to airtight containers to use as prizes, teaching tools, and giveaways for other classes in our school and special events.

Persuade Others To…: by educating our school on the amount of food waste we noticed in garbage cans, collaborating with our green team to conduct audits, informing the school of FoodCycler and its technology, using the FoodCycler daily and watching the creation of fertilizer, we see less food going into the garbage in our classroom, as well as less food waste overall when we do garbage audits around the school. This shows us that students at Ingleborough are rethinking what we consider “garbage”, especially in terms of food.

Fund Raising: We have even begun to expand this project for next year, in order to have a lasting impact and keep composting at Ingleborough a priority: students created a website entitled “Greens Do Come True”, which has many exciting eco-friendly incentives and prizes (i.e., reusable cutlery, headphones made from recycled material, class composting contests, school wide composting challenges and quizzes, class-sign up to “rent” the FoodCycler, general information and much more. We are going to focus more on fund-raising for the prizes and incentives.