Vision

The students’ vision was to create a cycle that decreased the compost that our school sent to composting facilities and landfills and use this compost to support classroom greenhouse plant growth. Our composting cycle successfully allowed students to start with food waste, go through a number of stages, and end up with fresh nutritious food on the other end!

Action

Students started our action project by spreading awareness throughout the school with posters, encouraging the students of David Thompson to properly compost and avoid throwing compostable material into garbage cans.

We then purchased red wriggler compost worms and created multiple small vermicompost systems. Then, on a weekly basis, students collected compost from compost bins, ensuring it was compost that could be fed to the red wrigglers. Through this process, the population of red wriggler worms has continually increased.

In the meantime, students in other classes had set up a greenhouse and started planting various herbs, vegetables, and fruits. Once the plants began to sprout, the final stage of the composting cycle was to take the nutritious worms castings from the worm bins and use them to support plant growth in the classroom greenhouse.

Reflection & Celebration

Through this process, students helped the environment and supported sustainability in our school by:
• encouraging the use of compost bins around the school so that less food waste was going to the landfill
• increasing students’ understanding of the purpose of composting
• decreasing the amount of compost that large, polluting trucks need to pick up, as well as decreasing the amount of compost that needed to be processed in facilities. Both of these improvements decreased the amount of pollution that occurred in relation to our school’s composting.
• implementing a classroom greenhouse and using the worm castings (natural, nutritious fertilizer), to improve our ability to grow herbs and vegetables.