Vision

Our students were researching how they could improve our watershed. One of the areas that they looked at was food waste created in a school on a regular basis.

From there, they discovered the FoodCycler for Schools on the Outdoor Learning Store website. They hoped that they could not only help to stem the amount of food waste produced within the school but also create compost for our newly created school garden areas.

Action

Students tracked how much food waste was created across 5 different classrooms over the course of a week to get baseline data. The average amount of waste a day was approximately 3. This was lower than they anticipated, however, was still pretty high. They questioned how effectively classrooms were using the compost, however, they were unable to supervise this.

Once the FoodCycler for Schools arrived, students began filling it each day with the food scraps generated from 3 classrooms of grade 8s, and sometimes from the staff room.

Over the course of the tracked project, students saved 41 kg of food waste from the landfill, and turned it into 5.2 kg of dried, ground, ready to mix in compost. This was added to our new school garden project that was also being developed.

Reflection & Celebration

This is important to our community because there is food waste happening everywhere, every day. Our students were able to see how a small action could over time save a lot of food and add compost to our gardens in a much simpler way than a traditional compost bin. We acknowledge that the compost produced in the FoodCycler is different from traditional compost, but still has many benefits.

Students are hoping to continue this project, and potentially expand it further into our school for next year. Other staff and students have been coming in to check it out and there’s lots of interest in what the students are doing.

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